Inspiration from Savitri

An Inspiration came to me more than a year ago, so powerfully that I capitalize the word, Inspiration. I was guided to write a series of books that would be compilations of various themes in Savitri. Beginning with a small volume, Colours and Gems, I researched and studied all the lines and passages that contained a colour or gem. It was a work of great joy for gradually numerous revelations burst forth from the pages of Savitri and an entire series began to unfold.

Why was this path chosen? Let me go back many years, more than fifty, since I first held a copy of Savitri in my hands. I have written elsewhere of my experience in the Ashram in 1961 when I was given a copy of The Odyssey, by Nikos Kazantzakis a poem of some 33,000 lines written in Greek and translated into English. I read the book with great delight, moved by the innumerable ways he would describe the sun, etc. However, when I was given a copy of Savitri it was such a revelation that I never picked up The Odyssey again.

I met Purani in America when he was visiting the U.S. giving a series of lectures on Savitri. He opened Savitri to me as in a blaze of light, the first to do so. I was spellbound by the beauty of the lines he quoted and the way he presented the poem with such brilliance, devotion and humility.

To answer the question as to why I was inspired to take up this formidable and spiritually rewarding inner work of reading Savitri day after day and, in the compilation of the Lexicon of an Infinite Mind, A Dictionary of Words and Terms in Savitri, year after year, requires some elucidation. Through the generous sharing of their time, Nolini Kanta Gupta, Amal Kiran and Arabinda Basu guided me with their enlightened responses to my numerous questions. I am deeply grateful to them and to Madhav Pandit, Sraddhalu Ranade and Jhumur Bhattacharya who have also helped me to understand various terms and phrases. The Lexicon is nearing completion, with only a final proof-reading to be completed and is now in the process of publication by the Savitri Foundation.

I recall that Mother said humanity was not yet ready for Savitri and it would take a hundred years before it became accessible to many. When the Inspiration series came to me I began again to immerse myself in the poem and have continued for more than a year now with much more still to be done on pending volumes. Ever since I can remember, lines and passages come to me spontaneously and reverberate within my soul.

One recent Darshan day the following lines came:

A MORN that seemed a new creation’s front,

Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies,

Came burdened with a beauty moved and strange

Out of the changeless origin of things.

And as I was sitting in the queue for more than an hour on November 17th, 2013, these lines came:

And the solemn weight of the slowly-passing months

Had left in her deep room for thought and God.

What an incomparable blessing to prepare oneself to go to Mother's room reciting these lines over and over.

In my travels throughout the world I read Savitri to all who are interested. Yet I often meet people for whom Savitri is closed, impenetrable, abstruse and formidable, almost forbidding. I believe this occurs because we try to understand with our very limited and limiting mental capacity, something that has been written from far above the mind, descending from the highest planes.

And yet for me, even though large portions of the poem were incomprehensible to the mind and remain so today, especially Book Two where Sri Aurobindo describes the various kingdoms he enters where none had gone before, something within resonates to the beauty of the passages, the divine music, supreme and sublime, the power and utmost clarity of expression, and now, always, the mantra that enters the soul through Yoga's ear.

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self

Are seized unutterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change;

He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:

An equal greatness in her life was sown.

There came to me years ago, a power of the Word repeating itself in rhythmic strains and I thought, how could I share the magnificence, the utter perfection of this incomparable epic with those who have found no way to enter or hesitate to attempt reading Savitri?

Sri Aurobindo in his letters to disciples on the composition of Savitri writes the following:

"The things I lay most stress on then are whether each line in itself is the inevitable thing not only as a whole but in each word; whether there is the right distribution of sentence lengths (an immensely important thing in this kind of blank verse); whether the lines are in their right place, for all the lines may be perfect, but they may not combine perfectly together — bridges may be needed, alterations of position so as to create the right development and perspective etc., etc."

And again: "The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to under-stand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer."

And lastly, "But for that the critic must be one who has seen and felt what is in the thing written, not like your friend who has not seen anything and understood only the word surface and not even always that; he must be open to this kind of poetry, able to see the spiritual vision it conveys, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes, — the fit reader...."

Who then could be the 'fit reader'? I thought of all the people who love flowers and animals and Nature, and the book on Nature was born out of my love for passages I have read so many times and with gratitude, share with others, passages such as:

The neighing pride of rapid life that roams

Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood

Cast shapes of swiftness; trooping spotted deer

Against the vesper sky became a song

Of evening to the silence of my soul.

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

King-fisher flashing to a darkling pool;

A slow swan silvering the azure lake,

A shape of magic whiteness, sailed through dream;

Leaves trembling with the passion of the wind,

Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air,

And wandering wings in blue infinity

Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.

or these lines on flowers and the beauty of Nature

Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,

Pure like the breath of an unstained desire

White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,

Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice

Of the love-maddened coïl, and the brown bee

Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.

The sunlight was a great god’s golden smile.

All Nature was at beauty’s festival.

or

Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers

And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,

And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,

Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,

And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,

And with the glory of the noons were one.

And so, the series, Inspirations from Savitri, was born with the kind and cheerful encouragement of RY Deshpande and the generous assistance of Narendra Gelhaut. Volume I, "Joy", has just been published and other books are nearing completion. My hope and my prayer, in beginning this 'adventure of consciousness and joy' and immersing myself, in the day as in the night, in Savitri, is that these books will be a window through which one can view an aspect that appeals to the heart and the soul, leading to the opening of a door to the future of the earth and the advent of the Divine Man, the superman, who will heal division and darkness by the power of the truth-consciousness and, entering deeper into the pages of Savitri, become aware that the poem represents the conquest of love over death. Sri Aurobindo and Mother, the dual Avatars, have brought down a new world in the process of rapidly transforming this earthly life to a life divine.

These words of the Mother, written in Her own hand, should be on our desks and engraved in our hearts for all time.

The importance of Savitri is immense.

Its subject is universal.

Its revelation is prophetic.

The time spent in its

atmosphere is not wasted.

It will be a happy compensation

For the feverish haste men put

Now in all they do.

The Mother 10.2.1967

Savitri

The supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision.

Savitri is for me, the Way of Love. To be immersed in it constantly is to be blessed beyond all understanding. For nearly ten years now I have quoted lines from Savitri to the OM Choirs in many countries and have found that the opening to the New Music increases with the mantric power of the lines, bringing a higher level of opening, offering and aspiration.

Similarly, when I share passages from Savitri with students I see their countenance change and often there appears not only the face of joy but the impression of a light within and surrounding them.

This passage from Savitri was quoted recently at one of the OM Choirs.

The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,

More and more souls shall enter into light,

Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear

And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame

And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight

And human wills tune to the divine will,

These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel,

These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,

The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy

And mortal bodies of immortality.

I close with these words of the Mother on Sri Aurobindo:

It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the

densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his

presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness

shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed

established upon earth.

O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows

with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no

bounds.

My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent.

30 March 1914

What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a

teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from

the Supreme.

14 February 1961

Since the beginning of earth history, Sri Aurobindo has always

presided over the great earthly transformations, under one form

or another, one name or another.

*

It is said that Sri Aurobindo in a past life took an active

part in the French Revolution. Is it true?

You can say that all through history Sri Aurobindo played an

active part. Especially in the most important movements of history

he was there—and playing the most important, the leading

part. But he was not always visible.

23 January 1960

Narad (Richard Eggenberger)

November 2013