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Study notes No. 26

INVOCATION is an occasional publication of SAVITRI

BHAVAN in Auroville. All correspondence may be addressed
to:
SAVITRI BHAVAN
AUROVILLE 605101, TN
INDIA
Telephone: 0413-2622922
e-mail: [email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Unless otherwise indicated all quotations and photographs of the
Mother and Sri Aurobindo are copyright of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Trust, Pondicherry, reproduced here with acknowledgements and
thanks to the Trustees. We are particularly grateful for permission
use the word Invocation in Sri Aurobindos handwriting as our
banner.
Edited by Shraddhavan for Savitri Bhavan, Auroville
Design by Prisma, Auroville
Printed at All India Press, Pondicherry
February 2007

CONTENTS

Remembering Nirodbaran

The Object of the Integral Yoga

Professor Arabinda Basu

The Traveller of the Worlds:

approaching the second Book of Savitri
Dr. M.V. Nadkarni

13

Narad comes chanting through the

large and lustrous air
R.Y. Deshpande

31

Vedic symbols in Savitri

Sri Aurobindo on Symbols

49

Night and Dawn (Part I)

Vladimir Iatsenko

51

Vedic Symbols in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Professor R.Y. Kashap

61

News of Savitri Bhavan

81

Warrior Soul
My life is as a slow unveiling
Of the imaged beauty of thy Light,
Like a dry century of darkness
Ransomed from the coils of night.
A dimmest star on a fringe of sky
Is glowing like an incense-flame
And spreads its diamond hint of splendour
In a shrine that bears thy haloed Name.
White petals of my voiceless love
Thy luminous feet adorn,
Where flowers of a heavenly hue
In silence bow, from silence born.
Still, as the flaming vision grows
And the rapt Godward consciousness,
I hear a sharp and stabbing cry
Tearing my soul's intensities.
It is the giant cry of death
Who lures me like a serpent-eye
Into his tombed oblivion
Like a star fallen from thy sky.
I will rise yet healed of my mortal wounds
To thy dome of jewelled ecstasy,
A warrior-soul invincible,
Chainless, orbed with infinity!
NIRODBARAN
From "Sun Blossoms" : Poems by Nirodbaran, Bombay 1947

Remembering Nirodbaran
Our very dear eldest brother Nirodbaran left his body peacefully on
July 17, 2006 just four months before his 103rd birthday. We cannot
mourn the passing of one who had lived such a long and richly blessed
life, knowing that surely his soul is where he always wished to be,
where he belonged, close to the Master and the Mother. We can only
be grateful for the great privilege we enjoyed, of some closeness to
him in his last years, and his unstinting support and encouragement
for the dream of Savitri Bhavan.
Nirod-da loved Auroville, and was happy whenever there was an
opportunity for him to come out to meet Aurovilians. He used to visit
the Matrimandir often, but also readily accepted invitations to get to
know other parts of Auroville. And his special relationship with Savitri,
as Sri Aurobindo's scribe during the later stages of its composition, is
well known. In his book Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo Nirodbaran
has given a uniquely intimate picture of how Sri Aurobindo worked
on the poem during the 1940s and right up to a couple of weeks
before leaving his body on December 5, 1950. So Nirod-da's interest
in and support for our project was a very great encouragement to all
involved in its development.
In 1994, when Savitri Bhavan was hardly even a dream, the Study
Circle used to meet at the Laboratory of Evolution in Bharat Nivas.
Nirod-da was one of the first speakers who visited us there.
Then came the Foundation Day November 24, 1995. In the
presence of many well-wishers from the Ashram and Auroville Nirodda invoked the Presence and Blessings of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother, and laid the Foundation Stone for the new project the
real beginning of Savitri Bhavan.
After that the weekly Study Circle started meeting under the trees on
the site. Members also started planting the garden together. A next
step came with the raising of a simple keet shelter on the site. Nirod-da
was one of the first guest speakers there. Construction of the First
4

Phase building was started in December 1998. Nirod-da enthusiastically

inspected the on-going work during a visit in February 1999.
August 8th, 1999 saw the Inauguration of the First Phase. On this
happy day, Nirod-da first planted a 'Supramental Sun' (kadamba)
sapling, then cut the ribbon and led us into the new building, where he
lit the lamp and gave a short talk. He concluded with these words :
There is no doubt about it that Savitri Bhavan will go
on growing, and soon we shall all be very happy to
receive again another invitation in four or five years'
time. But by that time my soul will be, I hope, with the
Lord. That is all I have to say.
After that there were many visits over the next few years. In April
2001 Nirod-da brought a group of friends to see the exhibition of
paintings by Chinese sadhak Hu Hsu, which had been loaned to us
by the Ashram Art Gallery, and organized by Franz. That day, we
had a picnic tea in the garden.
On March 5th, 2003 Dr. Nadkarni gave the concluding session of his
series of Savitri study camps in the garden. Nirod-da joined the
audience, and chatted with friends under the trees after the talk.

March 5, 2003

But after his 100th birthday in November 2003 Nirod-da's health

declined. When our Second Phase building was inaugurated on
November 21st, 2004 five and a half hears after the inauguration
of the first building Nirod-da was not well enough to attend the
ceremony. Sudha lit the lamp on his behalf. In the evening, General
Ashoke Chatterji brought him in his car to see the building. He looked
into it through the open doorway without getting down from the car.
This was his last visit to Savitri Bhavan.
On August 20th 2006 some of Nirod-da's family members and close
associates gathered to share sweet memories with us. We felt his
smiling presence in our midst.

Nirod-das niece Dolly speaking on August 20, 2006

One of Nirod-da's closest friends was Professor Arabinda Basu,

Whenever he came to give a talk at Savitri Bhavan, Nirod-da would
come with him. So it was appropriate that on this occasion, Arindamda should speak. The text of his talk follows.
6

The Object of the Integral Yoga

Talk by Professor Arabinda Basu
August 20, 2006
Children of the Mother, many of you have heard lectures on, or
read articles about, the theme of this evenings discourse. I have
chosen to speak on this topic for two reasons.
First, for about the last two years I have myself heard many
lectures and read several articles on this topic, but it has always
seemed to me that these essays at explaining the object of the
integral yoga, though very learned, have missed the fundamental
point.
Secondly, it was a very favourite subject of Nirodbaran. He
was a poet who wrote poems the ideas of which are very substantial
and full of devotion, and they have high poetic quality both in English
and Bengali. He was also a biographer, and a writer of literary
essays. His collection of Bengali compositions, Rachara-Bichitra,
is marvellous in thought and style. And of course his volumes
Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Conversations with Sri
Aurobindo, and Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo are works which
will keep his name remembered for a long time. But his true interest
was yoga, and he tried to the last days of his life to understand the
principles and practice the disciplines of the Integral Yoga. He
discussed what Sri Aurobindo preached and practiced endlessly
with people young and old to whom he could open his mind and
heart. Therefore, it is in the fitness of things that this evenings
discourse should be on the object of the Integral Yoga.
In a letter, the last line of which clinches the issue by saying : The
Divine alone is our object Sri Aurobindo writes,
The object of the yoga is to enter into and be possessed
by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the
Divine for the Divines sake alone, to be tuned in our
nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and
works and life to be the instrument of the Divine. Its
7

object is not to be a great yogi or a Superman (although

it may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the
egos power, pride or pleasure. It is not for Moksha
though liberation comes by it and all else may come but
these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our
object.
(SABCL 22-23-24:503)

It can be clearly seen that the emphasis is on the Divine. Sri

Aurobindo says that an aspirant has to enter into the Divines
Presence and Consciousness. He also has to love the Divine for
the Divines sake alone. There are seekers who have devotion to
and love for the Divine because they want power, glory, position,
money, fame and all kinds of worldly benefits. This is very far from
the real aim of the yoga. The next part of the sentence brings in an
original point which is the distinctive mark of the integral yoga. It is,
to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine. Not only
that, the aim also includes the idea that the aspirant should seek to
be the instrument of the Divine in his will and works and life. Sri
Aurobindo gives a whole list of what the practitioner of the integral
yoga must not want to be. It must not be his aim to be a great yogi
or a Superman, or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the egos
power, pride or pleasure. The next sentence strikes a note which
may seem very strange to seekers of Moksha or liberation. Sri
Aurobindo says the aim is not Moksha, though liberation does come
about by the yoga. And he adds that all else may also come, but
says that these must not be the integral yogis object.
It has been said in the quotation given above that the object of
the yoga is not to become a Superman. It may be asked, and with
justification, why Sri Aurobindo gives so much emphasis on the
ascent to the supramental level of consciousness. Let us first make
it clear that to realise the Divine it is not necessary to attain the
supermind.
The spiritual realisation can be had on any plane, writes
Sri Aurobindo, by contact with the Divine (who is
everywhere) or by perception of the Self within, which
is pure and untouched by the outer movements. The
8

supermind is something transcendent a dynamic

Truth-Consciousness which is not there yet, something
(Ibid:19)
to be brought down from above.
Sri Aurobindo has said a number of times that the supermind is
completely free from Ignorance. That is why it is imperative that a
sadhak must realise the Self which is above and beyond the Ignorance.
And this can be done, as we learn from the quotation given above, on
any plane of consciousness. Indeed Sri Aurobindo has also said that
the attaining of the experiential knowledge of the Self can start on
the higher mental level. As he says, there is a kind of liberation in the
Higher Mind also. But it must also be pointed out that this knowledge
is not complete, and therefore the liberation from Ignorance which it
gives is not perfect. Since we have said above that the supermind
alone is completely free from the Ignorance, the perfect and complete
knowledge of the Self and the Divine can be accomplished on the
supramental plane of consciousness alone. It is because of this that it
is essential in the integral yoga to ascend to the supramental plane of
consciousness. It is, as Sri Aurobindo says, only the supramental that
is All-Knowledge. All below that, from supermind to matter, is
Ignorance. It may be asked that if all below the supermind is Ignorance,
how can there be any knowledge of the Self, however incomplete,
obtained by the Higher Mind? But here we have to take note of a
very important point in both the philosophy and the integral yoga of
Sri Aurobindo. It is that Ignorance is growing from level to level
towards the full Knowledge. There may be knowledge before
supermind, but it is not All-Knowledge. That is why in order to have
the complete and integral knowledge of the Divine, it is essential to
ascend to the supermind.
It has been said above that one of the objects of the integral yoga is
to love the Divine for the Divines sake. But that is not the total aim
of the yoga. The yoga also calls upon its practitioner to be tuned into
the nature of the Divine and to be the instrument of the Divine in his
will and works and life. The power of the yoga has to be applied to
the radical change of his nature. This is the great ideal of the
transformation of human nature, of mans mental, vital and physical
instrumentation. This can be done only by the transforming power of
9

the supermind, which is identical with the complete and integral

knowledge of the Divine.
The physical transformation means making all the cells of the body
fully conscious and thus spiritual. We may recall in this connection
Sri Aurobindos prophetic line:
Even the body shall remember God.

(Savitri, p.707)

Remembering is a conscious act. Matter can remember only if it

becomes conscious. This implies that the cells of the body will be
able to know what they are in essence. They are formations of
conscious energy. We may say that they will be liberated in the
traditional sense of the term, because they will have self-knowledge.
Conquest of death is a consequence of this self-knowledge which
will come as a result of the transformation of the physical cells by
the supramental consciousness and knowledge-will.
The yoga aims at the total transformation of the nature of the
Ignorance which rules the world now and of which human nature is
a part. But this is a means towards the complete manifestation of
the Divine on the earth. Sri Aurobindo has written about the
transformation of earth-consciousness. This is a very difficult point
in his philosophy and a most difficult thing to accomplish in his yoga.
It wants to pull the elements of the Ignorance out of the cosmic
Nature. This is because, according to Sri Aurobindo, the Divine
intends to make a new self-discovery under conditions which obtain
on the earth alone and not on any other plane of consciousness.
The realisation of the integral Divine does not only mean to make
real to oneself the different aspects of the Divine on its own plane
of existence. It also means the realisation of the Divines new aspect
of manifestation in Matter made conscious and spiritualised by the
transforming power of a supramental Knowledge-Will: the new
intended self-discovery of the Divine as the material Divine, if I
may so express the idea. And this ideal is also included in realisation
of the supramental transformation of consciousness and the
comprehensive concept of the integral Divine.
10

Now, in the light of what has been said, the statement of Sri Aurobindo
that the Divine alone is the object of the yoga takes on new dimensions
and significance. Nevertheless, whatever additional significance is
implied by the aim of the realisation of the material Divine does not
alter the meaning of Sri Aurobindos categorical statement The Divine
alone is the object of the yoga.
Sri Aurobindo has mentioned the conquest of death as one of the
results of the integral yoga. Much has been made of this idea by
lecturers and writers on Sri Aurobindos yoga. It is true that Sri
Aurobindo has written about the conquest of death and physical
immortality in The Life Divine. It is not necessary to elaborate this
point here. But it should be pointed out that though Sri Aurobindo
believes in the possibility of physical immortality, he has also said that
it is something minor, the last result of the supermind.
What is vital, Sri Aurobindo has written, is the supramental
change of consciousness conquest of death is
something minor and, as I have always said, the last
physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most
important a thing to be added to complete the whole,
not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is
to reverse all spiritual values it would mean that the
seeker was actuated, not by any high spiritual aim but
by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking
for the security of the body such a spirit could not
bring the spiritual change.
(SABCL 22-23-24:1233)

In conclusion it must be pointed out that Sri Aurobindo firmly believed

not only in the possibility but also in the achievement of conquest of
death. Sri Aurobindo has written,
... the endeavour towards this achievement is not new
and some yogis have achieved it, I believe but not in
the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi
maintained by yoga-siddhi not a dharma of the nature.
(Ibid: 95)

11

Here the words dharma of the nature are most important. This
means, as I understand it, that the yogis who accomplished the
conquest of death did so individually and did not achieve what they
achieved in a way that the result of it could be part of the nature and
thus become available to other seekers and sadhaks. But, as I have
indicated above, the physical transformation will be the means of a
new self-discovery by the Divine of Himself here on earth. The
practitioner of integral yoga will also realise that new aspect of the
Divine, as an essential part of what Sri Aurobindo means by The
Divine alone is our object.

12

The Traveller of the Worlds:

approaching the second Book of
Savitri
Talk by Dr. M.V. Nadkarni
March 5, 2006
We are gathering here after a gap of three years. We concluded our
first reading or study of Savitri in 2003. Then I turned my attention
to Essays on the Gita. For the last two or three years I have been
doing Essays on the Gita. To me, everything that Sri Aurobindo
wrote needs to be celebrated, so Ive been doing it. But Savitri is a
special book; you cant keep away from it for very long. And if you
remember what the Mother once said about Savitri you know how
true it is. She said :
Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the
Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for
Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to
Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practise yoga,
spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is
needed to realise the Divine. Each step of yoga is noted
here, including the secret of all other yogas. Surely, if one
sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one
will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental
Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons
you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow
the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra
which surpasses all that man possessed by the way of
knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and
arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm
leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
So this February I once again took up Savitri. We began the study
camp on February 23rd and as usual we met for two sessions every
13

morning except on February 28th which was observed here in

Auroville as well as in Pondicherry as the Golden Jubilee of the
Supramental Manifestation on Earth.
This time, instead of starting our study from Book One, Canto One, I
decided to take up Book Two. This was for a number of reasons. First,
among the twelve Books that make up Savitri, Book Two is probably
the least studied or written about. Secondly, I was not very happy with
the way we dealt with it during our first reading. And very often you
will find people who have no opening to Savitri, no understanding of
Savitri, cite passages from Book Two to make the point that Sri
Aurobindo was no poet, that Savitri is no poetry. But you will see that
of all the three Parts of Savitri, the First Part that consists of Books
One, Two and Three was entirely written by Sri Aurobindo in his own
hand. Many parts of Savitri, as we all know, were written down by
Nirodbaran to Sri Aurobindos dictation. But the first three Books were
written down by Sri Aurobindo himself. He made several copies of
them. So they have received the maximum amount of attention from
the poet himself.
Now the difficulty that arises in understanding Book Two is that it
deals with a most uncommon kind of experience. It talks about worlds
that you and I have no access to. And because we have no access to
these worlds, we tend to imagine that these worlds dont exist. We may
think that they are all a fabrication of Sri Aurobindos imagination and
that he just weaves words after words after words because this is the
longest book. As you know its about 210 pages long, 15 cantos long. But
Sri Aurobindo has told us, with particular reference to this book, that
Savitri is a record of a seeing, of an experience which is
not of the common kind and is often very far from what
the general human mind sees and experiences. You must
not expect appreciation or understanding from the general
public or even from many at the first touch. As I pointed
out there must be a new extension of consciousness and
aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of poetry.
In the 15 cantos of Book Two Sri Aurobindo tries to convey his
experience of several worlds other than this terrestrial world. The
14

language he uses is austere and direct because it tries to capture

the very essence of his experience of these worlds. I personally
believe that some of the finest examples of his poetry are to be
found in this book.
Evolution is generally a topic for scientific study, scientific analysis.
Nobody else has looked at it as a high drama of evolutionary struggle,
as a great drama that is enacted on the stage of this Earth, in this
world. Sri Aurobindo brings us the excitement of this drama. It is this
that he wants to convey to us.
If you go through these 15 cantos your way of looking at the
world gets changed completely. It is not a scientists view of the
world, it is not a philosophers view of the world. As you read it more
and more, you begin to see that it is Gods own view of the world.
Literature very often has this gift to make to us: normally we are
all caught up in our personal way of looking at the world. However
well-informed you are, however well travelled you are, it is very hard
to cast off the shackles of ones own egoistic perspective on life.
Literature very often gives us a temporary freedom; we begin to see
the world through the eyes of Tolstoy, the eyes of a French writer, or
the eyes of an African writer. That is the benefit, that is the advantage
of reading literature. But no other writer gives you this vast perspective.
When you read Sri Aurobindo, when you read Savitri, you suddenly
feel you are looking at the world from Gods own perspective. So
there is hardly anything you cannot sympathise with, hardly anything
you do not feel has some sense behind it. All the great tragedies, all the
great black things that happen in this life beyond all this you see a
great light dimly glowing. That is the perspective which Savitri gives,
and that I think is the greatest benefit we derive from Savitri.
Sri Aurobindo was writing Savitri during the darkest days in
human history. The Second World War was being waged, and if you
look at the literature produced in Europe at that time it is full of dark
forebodings. Many people came to the conclusion that humanity had
no future if Man can behave like this. In those 8 to 9 years the whole
crop of European youth was just wiped out. So that was a depressing
period, and many people thought that probably Man is going to destroy
his own species. It was at that time that Sri Aurobindo was writing
this, and he knew that it would not be a best seller. But as he was
writing it, I feel that he was impregnating the occult worlds with
15

vibrations of hope, vibrations of joy and vibrations of the certitude

that this human struggle is not in vain. It will be a difficult struggle, it
will be a long struggle: Nature has taken billions of years to bring us
to this level. But, after all, it is a struggle guided by the Lord. The
Lord is the charioteer of the struggle, and we are bound to win. It is
this kind of a faith, this kind of a confidence, that the reading of
Savitri gives you and particularly this part, which is generally
regarded as the story of evolution, with the survival of the fittest etc.
which is a gloomy tale . Lo and behold, Sri Aurobindo gives us a
totally different perspective on this. That is the reason why I decided,
in spite of my inadequacies, to turn to Book Two.
Now you cant just jump into Book Two, Canto One, because it is
preceded by the five Cantos of Book One; and I know that there are
many people in the audience who were not here the first time this
was done, maybe seven years ago. So I decided to review Aswapatis
yoga as a whole, and the first two sessions were devoted to a wideranging survey of Savitri as a whole, so that people could know
what the story is about, what the issues are and so on. Once we have
this background then we can focus on a smaller part of Savitri.
Richard Hartz has pointed out somewhere that it is strange that
the two principal events in the story of Savitri, namely the death of
Satyavan which is described in the Book of Death, Book Eight, and
his resuscitation which is described in Book Twelve, The Epilogue,
are the shortest of the twelve Books of this epic. Sri Aurobindo devotes
a Book to each of these events but they are the smallest of the Books.
Not only are they the smallest of the Books, but also these Books are
just the ones that have not received the same kind of thorough revision
which all the other Books have received from him. So Sri Aurobindos
relative lack of interest in these Books suggests that neither the
common fact of death nor the rare phenomena of a return to life was
what interested him the most, but rather the forces behind these surface
happenings. The entire epic poem Savitri delineates what these forces
are and what yogic sadhana is necessary to make the ideal of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother a reality.
The combined capacity of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother brought
down the Supramental Consciousness on Earth in 1956, and recently
16

we celebrated the Golden Jubilee of this event, probably the greatest

in human history so far. Yet something is still missing. The complete
siddhi of Savitris yoga and also of Aswapatis yoga is yet to come.
Savitri is certain that this will come. So was Sri Aurobindo. So was
The Mother. This victory will come. And the Supreme assures us,
assures Savitri towards the end of the epic:
All things shall manifest the covert God,
All shall reveal the Spirits light and might
And move to its destiny of felicity.
Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

(p. 708)

The end of Death has not yet come about. Satyavan was resuscitated,
but that was another deal. Immortality in Sri Aurobindos philosophy,
in Sri Aurobindos way of looking at things, is not a gift somebody
can give you; one has to earn it by doing this enabling sadhana and
this sadhana is still there to be done by us.
The Supreme also lays down two conditions that must be fulfilled
before such a great fulfilment can be achieved. By the great fulfilment
I mean the conquest of death and the death of Ignorance. This again
is very clearly laid out on the same page:
But first high Truth must set her feet on earth
And man aspire to the Eternals light
And all his members feel the Spirits touch
And all his life obey an inner Force.
Two conditions: first, Truth must set its feet on earth. That has happened.
The Mother proclaimed that on 28 February 1956 the Supramental had
descended on Earth. But what about the second part, the part that you
and I are supposed to play? Of these two conditions, the first has been
fulfilled, the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother has made high Truth
set her feet on earth. But Man that is you and I has still to fulfil the
second condition, which is to let all our members feel the Spirits touch
and our life obey the inner Force. The Grace from above has acted. It is
the activation from below which is still weak and faltering. So this is
what I said in the introductory talks, the two talks on the first day.
17

After this introductory talk on the first day we turned our attention to
Aswapatis yoga, which is of utmost significance to us because, in a
large measure, Aswapatis yoga was Sri Aurobindos own yoga. The
description of this yoga begins with Book One, Canto Three and
extends to the end of that Book, covering Cantos Three, Four and
Five. Then come the 15 cantos of Book Two. 15 + 3 is 18, then add
the four cantos of Book Three, making 22 cantos in all: a little more
than 300 pages just devoted to the yoga of Aswapati. So you can see
how important Aswapatis yoga is to this enterprise.
Now is there any system behind it, any gradation of the different
parts of Aswapatis yoga? Yes, Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters has
given us guidance. He says that Aswapatis yoga falls into three
parts. First, he is achieving his own spiritual fulfilment as an individual
and this is described in The Yoga of the King. The Yoga of the
King is the title of Cantos Three and Five of Book One. The canto
sandwiched between them, Canto Four, has a different title. It is
called The Secret Knowledge. But the first part of Aswapatis
yoga is described in Cantos Three and Five of Book One. Next he
makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the
possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of
consciousness, and this is described in the Second Book. Aswapati
explores all the worlds as a representative of mankind. Finally he
aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and
a new creation. This is described in The Book of the Divine Mother,
which is Book Three with its four cantos.
The Yoga of the King has two parts. The first is described as
The Yoga of the Souls Release from Ignorance. That is described
in Book One, Canto Three. The second part of this yoga is called
The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness Canto Five. In
between them there is Canto Four which is The Secret Knowledge.
On occasion during the last 10 days I have drawn your attention
again and again to the fact that Savitri has its roots in the Vedic
tradition; and the very words secret knowledge also come from
the Vedic term ninya vacamsi. Sri Aurobindo has taken that title and
given it to this Canto.
What I did then was to try to give a brief review of Cantos
Three, Four and Five. A man saner than me would not have tried to
do this. It is impossible! You get stuck in any passage. There are so
18

many wonderful passages that on occasions I felt completely helpless

and didnt know whether we would ever be able to go beyond Canto
Three. But somehow I prayed and strength was given to me. These
three cantos are so rich in every respect that it was very difficult to
do what I wanted to do, just a quick summary. You cant do a quick
summary of Sri Aurobindo; it is impossible.
You know, very often people tell me You have given so many
talks on Savitri; please tell me in five minutes what Savitri is all
about, Im very busy. That is the problem. To each of these three
cantos I devoted sometimes two sessions, sometimes three sessions
which means that a major part of these last 10 days was devoted
to just a quick run-through of Cantos Three, Four and Five. It would
be impossible here today even to try to indicate in broad outlines the
contours of this phase of Aswapatis yoga. What I shall do instead is
read one passage from each one of these cantos, so that will bring
back to your mind some of the things associated with this passage.
And then I shall say in one or two sentences something about the
content of each canto.
Canto Three: this begins by announcing that the worlds desire brought
about Savitris birth. It begins by announcing that Savitris birth takes
place in response to the worlds desire or aspiration. Who embodies
this aspiration? Who embodies this call of the Earth to the Divine?
And then we are told that Aswapati does it. Who is Aswapati? We
are given a brief introduction to Aswapati. I will read a few a lines
about Aswapati.
One in the front of the immemorial quest,
Protagonist of the mysterious play
In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms
And limits his eternity by the hours
And the blind Void struggles to live and see,
A thinker and toiler in the ideals air,
Brought down to earths dumb need her radiant power.
His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
(p.22)
A colonist from immortality.
19

In other words, what Sri Aurobindo is trying to say is that not only
was Savitri an avatar, in some sense Aswapati was also an avatar.
He is a spirit who has come specially from a special world to colonise
this world with truth, the integral truth. Aswapatis yoga begins with
a description of that. Let me read the very first passage which
introduces this theme of what Aswapatis yoga is all about and that is
all I have time for today. This is a very well-known passage,
on page 23.
This bodily appearance is not all;
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.
His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years
An incognito of the Imperishable.
A spirit that is a flame of God abides,
A fiery portion of the Wonderful,
Artist of his own beauty and delight,
Immortal in our mortal poverty.
This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,
This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,
Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,
Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.
In the mute strength of the occult Idea
Determining predestined shape and act,
Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,
Changing his imaged self from form to form,
He regards the icon growing by his gaze
And in the worm foresees the coming god.
Once Aswapati realises that he is not the bodily appearance, that
there is something in him called the spark of the divine, that there is
something called the soul or the psychic being, he widens his being
and goes beyond his ego and loses his kinship with mortality and his
mind begins to expand. The cosmic worker now begins to work on
him and, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, turned his mud-engine to heavenuse. Humanity does not limit any more his outer or inner being. Latent
powers awake in him. He becomes a seer, a shining guest of time.
He enters a world of still consciousness and experiences peace that
20

passes all understanding. He now begins to see that this world is only
a small result of a stupendous force. His spiritual journey is described
and how he attains various spiritual siddhis. Inspiration and Intuition
now become his second nature.
We then move on to Canto Four. This is described as The Secret
Knowledge. It is a wonderful summary of the inner workings of this
creation. Aswapati now realises that this world is not what it seems on
the surface, namely a brute mechanic accident, but a miracle evolving
gradually toward its full blossoming. There is a wonderful section in
this canto which describes this whole creation as the play between
Purusha and Prakriti on different planes. Let me quote here one of my
favourite passages from this canto which talks about the way the Divine
always comes down to guide this world. This is on page 55.
Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
When darkness deepens strangling the earths breast
And mans corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thiefs in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into minds inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open lifes closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
In Matter shall be lit the spirits glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternals power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done
This place is a very wonderful surrounding in which to read passages
like this. I realise it now and regard myself as especially blessed to
21

have this opportunity of reading it here.

Now the last Canto we reviewed before we started on Book Two:
Canto Five : a brief word about that. This canto describes how
Aswapati rises beyond the bounds of nature. He could now see behind
the appearances of nature and also see how the Divine Mother works
under the hard conditions of night and ignorance. He has now a great
aspiration to bring the world of glory he has already seen down on
earth. He now also begins to understand the logic of the infinite. As
he begins his ascent to a great spiritual height he becomes aware of
a might that descends in him, of currents of light and power and
delight. Descent is a very favourite phrase in Sri Aurobindos yoga.
In this yoga all we are supposed to do is to open ourselves up so that
the descent can take place, so that we do not offer any impediments
to the descent of the power and one such descent is described here.
This is in the same canto, on page 81.
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 Unknowns grasp.
In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,
By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.
The siddhi that Aswapati acquires is described very briefly in these
lines on page 91, at the very end of Canto Five.
22

Affranchised from the net of earthly sense

Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;
Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes,
Half-seen at first through wonders gleaming lids,
Surprised the vision with felicity;
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
Now you must be wondering why I called it this course Looking at
Book Two when I am still talking about Book One. It is because we
cannot understand what these Worlds are, why Aswapati is travelling
through them, unless we have a certain background of his yoga. And
if you have concluded that I didnt make much progress with Book
Two then you are very right. I was ultimately able to cover only one
Canto of Book Two to my hearts satisfaction. What I have told you
about already was the background we covered before we could make
a start on Book Two.
Before we take up Book Two, which is, as I said, a description of
Aswapatis exploration of the different worlds, a number of questions
arise and we must find reasonable answers to these questions. Where
are these worlds? Where do you get the ticket for this journey; which
airline, whatever? What are they made of? And if it is so difficult to
explore these worlds why did Aswapati undertake it? What was the
need for him to undertake this exploration?
All these questions have been answered by Sri Aurobindo in
The Life Divine. Chapter 21 of Book Two of The Life Divine is
called The Order of the Worlds and there these questions have
been answered. Sri Aurobindo begins by saying that mankind from
the beginning of its existence has believed in the existence of other
worlds and in the possibility of communication between their powers
and the human race until the rationalistic period of human thought
began to sweep this belief aside as an old-fashioned superstition. He
says that all religions in all ages have believed in the existence of
other worlds. Only nowadays we have a new definition of reality:
that which is concrete, that which can be touched is real. That means,
in other words, that only what is made of matter is real. If something
23

is not made of matter, it is therefore not real, not true. But those other
worlds are not made of matter; they are made of substances other
than matter. What are these substances? If you study this particular
chapter it would be clear. Sri Aurobindos story of how the world
was created is also told very briefly. He, like the Purusha Sukta,
describes how the Supreme Divine was fascinated by his own shadow,
as The Mother puts it, and wanted to explore it. And in order to do
that he took a plunge into it and became the Inconscient.
Notice that when I am asking these questions I am submitting to
my humanness, because we would like to find out any reason for
doing things. Why should there be a reason for doing things? Why do
artists sing, why does a dancer dance? If he is a real dancer and if he
is a real musician he doesnt know why he does it, except he has a
delight and he wants to manifest it, he wants to express it. That is
why the Divine manifested himself. And how did he manifest? Well,
he took a plunge and became the Sea of the Inconscient, the
apraketam salilam. That is what the Purusha Sukta talks about
he took a plunge into the Sea of the Inconscient. Sri Aurobindo says
that it is reasonable to assume that this plunge was not a sudden
precipitous dive. What he assumes is that this was a step by step
descent. The Supreme Consciousness, the Sat-Chit-Ananda, makes
a step-by-step descent. Gradually and slowly he loses his glories, his
perfection, and puts on at the same time more and more layers and
waves of imperfection. This is how he descends, this is the WorldStair. The Purusha Sukta talks about 7 stages. According to the
Purusha Sukta the lowest step is Anna (Matter) then Life, Mind,
Vignana (what Sri Aurobindo translates as the supramental layer of
consciousness), Jana (bliss), Tapas (Consciousness-Force) and Satya
(Truth or Existence). These steps form the ladder by which the Divine
descended and became the Inconscient. Sri Aurobindo also assumes
that there was a parallel ladder created for his ascent. This is a double
ladder, a ladder for descent and another ladder for ascent. Because
the Divine is at the heart of the Inconscient, the Inconscient cannot
remain inconscient forever. There has to be a return journey. As he
goes back he takes the other ladder, the ladder of ascent, from matter
to life, life to mind, mind to supermind. This is the path he takes as he
goes up. This is the scheme that the Purusha Sukta describes and
Sri Aurobindo also adopts it. He describes it in other places, and
24

particularly in Book Two, Canto One he tells the same story. I shall
read that part, from Book Two, Canto One.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;
This higher scheme of being is our cause
And holds the key to our ascending fate;
It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matters house. (p.99)
You cannot suppress the aspiration for the Divine no matter where
you are or who you are, because essentially you are made of the
Divine. You can hide him for some time, suppress him for some time.
You know that they have done it everywhere. And wherever there is
a suppression of God, God rebounds with greater force. People have
tried to suppress him, but you cant suppress him for very long no
matter where you are. That is why, if you read Sri Aurobindo, you
feel that one does not need to feel despondent.
The world has not yet come to us, the world has not yet come
here. Some advisor to the European Common Market who came
here said that if the world comes to know about Auroville the Indian
Government will have to deploy its entire army to prevent people
rushing into Auroville. They dont yet know what a wonderful thing
this is. Similarly everybody will come to God. It is only a question of
time. Regard yourself as very lucky that you got here before others
came. There are no roads, there is clean air. Once all those people
come, all this will be story of the past.
There is this unsuppressable urge for the Divine in all of us. As
long as it is there, nobody is lost forever. In Sri Aurobindos terminology
and philosophy there is nothing like He is lost forever, he has gone
forever, he is in Hell forever. For one thing, Hell does not exist
except the Hell we create for ourselves. This is why there is this
constant aspiration in man, no matter in what conditions he finds
himself. Sri Aurobindo says :
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
Its unthought logic of Realitys acts
25

Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,

Have fixed our inner lifes slow-scaled degrees.
Its steps are paces of the souls return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
And the part here:
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godheads fall.
And this is a very famous sentence:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

(p.99)

This life has become possible because the Supreme has become inconscient.
The Supreme has become all of us. And so, since it is the Supreme which
has become all of us, we have to realise our real selves some day.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinitys lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
Now we know how the worlds came about, and that the worlds are
made of substance which is other than matter, and since it is subtler
than matter you require a certain inner capacity even to experience
these worlds. But, just because you cant see them, it doesnt mean
that they are powerless to act on you. They are acting on you. This is
what is happening all the time. The worlds are acting on us. The worlds
are acting on this Earth and Sri Aurobindo is saying this: These worlds
and they are not only worlds and powers, they are also beings may
have nothing to do with ourselves and our lives. They may exercise no
action upon us. But often also they enter into secret communication
with Earth existence. They obey or embody and are the intermediaries
26

and instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we

have a subjective experience. Or they act by their own initiative upon
the terrestrial worlds life and motives and happenings. It is possible to
receive help or guidance, or harm or misguidance, from these beings.
It is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed
by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their
good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be
a vast field of battle between supra-physical forces of either character;
those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine, and those that strive
to deflect, depress, prevent or even shatter the upward evolution or the
souls self-expression in the material Universe. These forces, adversary
forces, evil forces, whatever, they descend here at times and in a
concentrated way. Very often people find it difficult to explain the
atrocities of the Second World War and the terrible things that happened
in Europe then, except to say these must be the result a descent of evil
and hostile forces here on Earth to set back the evolutionary clock.
This has happened again and again in human history and so Sri
Aurobindo has always wondered why there have been so many avatars,
so many saints, people who have given new scriptures to mankind,
people who have lived such exemplary lives. There is Mahatma Gandhi,
there is the peace prize, there is this man, that man, but on the whole
humanity has not changed much. Human nature remains exactly the
same. There must be something impeding, obstructing our progress
towards God. What is it, where is it? This was Sri Aurobindos quest.
If you find these worlds, there is no government authority to
which you can write I find these worlds a world of evil; please do
something about it. You have to go there yourself to cleanse the
Augean stables. That is what Sri Aurobindo did for so long. You find,
written in his letters something like People think Im lost in the
Empyrean, Im lost in waves of bliss and ecstasy of the spiritual kind.
No; I am digging in a filth of horror, thats what Ive been doing.
These are the worlds of falsehood, the worlds of evil, and they
keep affecting us, they keep impeding us. And that is the greatest
contribution of Sri Aurobindo. Not that he built the Ashram, not that he
gave inspiration for Auroville the greatest contribution is that he
made it possible for the Ashram and Auroville to thrive by clearing
away the impediments in the occult world. That was his great work.
Even the writing of Savitri became secondary to that. Nirod-da has
27

mentioned in his writings, I used to go him in the morning with a pencil

and my notebook and on certain mornings Sri Aurobindo had no words
to dictate. Where was he? He was attending to his work, the work
that had to be done on the occult level to ensure a future for mankind.
It is in these worlds that he travels, it is these worlds that he explores.
And for somebody like Sri Aurobindo they are objective worlds. He
goes there and digs so that the river can flow. There is a beautiful
poem of his called A Gods Labour in which all this is portrayed.
That is why this whole idea of the exploration of the worlds is important.
Aswapati has been depicted as a seeker of integral Truth who seeks
to colonize this world with that Truth. Obviously he cannot find it
here in the gross physical world. He therefore begins by looking for
it in the other worlds. His first idea was, Maybe there is still something
missing in this world, which I may find in this world. But instead of
finding only good forces he also finds hordes and hordes of evil forces
which are impeding our progress, and he gets busy with those.
Sri Aurobindo says, somewhere in the same book :
In this slow ascension he must follow her pace
Even from her faint and dim subconscious start:
So only can earths last salvation come.
(p.135)
Why is it that nobody has yet been successful in solving the problem of
evil in this world? Because nobody has discovered where evil comes
from. So far spirituality has believed that it doesnt matter where the
evil comes from, because ultimately our interest is to abandon this ship
as lost and go to heaven or Nirvana or the Kingdom of God or whatever.
Sri Aurobindos enterprise is totally different. There is no other world
to which we want to go. We want to colonise this world. He has said
The heavens we have always possessed. It is earth that we have yet
to possess and the aim of my yoga is to make heaven and earth equal
and one This is what he wants to cultivate, he wants to bring this
world to perfection, and that explains his vast yoga, that explains his 40
years of incessant labour in that place called Pondicherry. This the
world has not understood. And that is why Savitri is the best
autobiographical window on Sri Aurobindos life.
28

All that needed to be said as a kind of a background. Now I should

conclude by giving you a brief summary of Canto One of Book Two.
As I have said, at the end of Book One we see Aswapati standing in
a region at the top of the Overmental world but he has not yet seen
the Supramental world that he sees later in Book Three, Canto
Three. From there he looks out and he suddenly begins to see God in
the very act of creation. He sees the world being created, he witnesses
all this, and that forms the first section of Canto One of Book Two.
In the second section, comes the story of how the world was born
and the descending stair and ascending stair I have already spoken
about. Then there is something else Sri Aurobindo mentions, which is
the macrocosm, all these worlds of consciousness. Scientists seem
puzzled by the fact that man is just a speck of dust in this vast universe
which has several hundreds and thousands of suns; they have planets,
and we are on one small planet called Earth; we are two-legged
animals on this earth. How do we ever hope to understand the world
which is so vast? What is it that gives us the right to say Im going to
explore the world? Here Sri Aurobindo says that we can understand
the world because a copy of the macrocosm is implanted in the
microcosm. That is, our individual consciousness also has a structure
which reflects the structure of the universe, its gradations, its stair of
worlds. Since we have this microcosm which has similar vibrations
we are able to understand the world. The world is not just the earth.
There is something called Consciousness surrounding us; below us,
above us and on all sides; we are constantly prompted by it. All this
he describes in this canto.
On our ninth day we concluded Book Two, Canto One. There was one
more day left. On that day what did we do? Of course we enjoyed
ourselves; we had devotional music and so on, but there were a couple
of sessions left. After the description of The World-Stair in Canto One,
Canto Two of Book Two deals with the subtle physical world. The subtle
physical world is probably the second world. Before that comes the
gross physical material world. Sri Aurobindo describes it in many places.
It is very interesting that, as Sri Aurobindo was growing up in
England and then later here, it was a time when Materialism was at
its peak. He had seen Materialism in its strongest form. He had met
some of the advocates of Materialism, he had read some of the books,
29

and he takes up this whole gospel of Materialism, the gospel of the

gross physical world as the sole reality, the idea that the physical
world is the only world (which is what many people believe) and he
describes various aspects of this whole scheme. It is this that is mainly
discussed in the dialogue, the conversation, between Savitri and the
god of Death in Book Ten Canto Four. So we reviewed the gospel of
Materialism as treated in Savitri and its various facets. Materialists
believe that all idealism is stupidity, all idealism is moonshine, that
love is nothing but a burning of the nerves, etc. We saw all these
things and how this whole program was built and how the whole
thing collapses. As I said, there is nothing wrong with materialism. I
wish India would go through a strong phase of materialism. The only
problem with materialism is that it trivialises life; it gives you nothing
to live for. This what Savitri says, and I talked about it at some length
on the last day of our camp.
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for keeping me company
not only in Pondicherry but also here in Auroville. We recently
celebrated the Golden Jubilee of the descent of the Supermind.
Remember what the Mother said: Most of us have not yet seen it,
have not yet felt it, but she said, Behave as if it is true, a fact. It has
happened and since it has happened our enterprises will succeed.
Savitri Bhavan will blossom into a wonderful centre and all the
dreams and aspirations of the team here will come true because the
supermind is already here on Earth and supermind will bring all the
resources needed, all the people needed. The job of people like me is
to be Town Criers calling out, There is Savitri Bhavan! Please go
there and take whatever it has to offer!
Thank you very much.

30

Narad comes chanting through the

large and lustrous air
Talk by R.Y.Deshpande
13 April 2006
Professor Deshpande, who teaches Physics to students of the
Higher Course of the Ashram School, has given us a series of
talks focussing on the first section of Canto One of Book Six of
Savitri. A transcript of the first talk, which took place in January
2006, appeared in issue 25 of Invocation. Here is an edited version
of the second, held in April. The topics of these talks, and many
others relating to this section, have been explored in wideranging detail and depth in Professor Deshpande's recently
published study: Narad's Arrival at Madra, ISBN: 81-7058-839-1,
published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education,
Puducherry, 471 pages, Price: Rs 150.
Today we shall try to examine a specific passage from Savitri. It
belongs to the Book of Fate, in fact the opening passage of 32 lines
which comes on page 415. It is a short passage, just four sentences,
but loaded with far-reaching implications. It is swift in its movement,
it is lyric-mystical, it is charged with the incandescent occult, it has
deep metaphysical connotations, carries timeless spiritual truths in it.
The passage begins with a description of Narad stepping out
one fateful morning from his home in Paradise. He is attracted by
the golden summer earth and is now on his way towards Aswapatis
palace. The passage runs as follows:
In silent bounds bordering the mortals plane
Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace
Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise
Came chanting through the large and lustrous air.
Attracted by the golden summer-earth
That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl
Tilted upon a table of the Gods,
31

Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand

To catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun,
He passed from the immortals happy paths
To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
To these rooms of a see-saw game of death and life.
Across an intangible border of soul-space
He passed from Mind into material things
Amid the inventions of the inconscient Self
And the workings of a blind somnambulist Force.
Below him circling burned the myriad suns:
He bore the ripples of the etheric sea;
A primal Air brought the first joy of touch;
A secret Spirit drew its mighty breath,
Contracting and expanding this huge world
In its formidable circuit through the Void;
The secret might of the creative fire
Displayed its triple power to build and form,
Its infinitesimal wave-sparks weaving dance,
Its nebulous units grounding shape and mass,
Magic foundation and pattern of a world,
Its radiance bursting into the light of stars;
He felt a sap of life, a sap of death;
Into solid Matters dense communion
Plunging and its obscure oneness of forms
He shared with a dumb Spirit identity.
We should read the passage again and again. It is so marvellous!
When we read it aloud, a kind of powerful atmosphere forms around
us, an atmosphere full of peace and brightness. So many things have
been said in this brief description. Its rapid dynamism is compelling,
its rush from one thing to the next has an epic breath, also an epic
majesty.
But what could have prompted Narad to visit Aswapati? Why does
he undertake the task of identifying himself with the dumb Spirit,
which is also a difficult task? He is a celebrated sage and his home is
32

high up in Vaikuntha, the Abode of Vishnu, Vishnu the Puranic

Sustainer of the Worlds. Does it mean that his visit is in some context
of Vishnus work? What could that context be? What is the work
that Vishnu is busy with? His one single concern is the progressive
spiritual evolution of the earth. He comes here from time to time,
yuge-yuge, comes as an Avatar for this purpose. So Narads visit
too must be connected with that evolutionary advance.
Narad comes chanting through the large and lustrous air, chanting
the Name of Vishnu, chanting always narayana-narayana,
narayana-narayana, narayana-narayana. In that Name he is also
carrying a mission. He has to deliver the Word of Fate; he has to set
free the spring of cosmic Fate, set destiny free. The poet says that
he has to strengthen the will of Savitri, turn it to steel. It is a big job.
It is a responsible job, a tough job also. But Narad does it in the name
of Vishnu. It is in that greatness that he comes here.
During his session with the royal parents he also does a few
more things. He justifies the ways of God to man; he explains the
riddle of this world and tells how the divine Purusha, the incarnate
Being makes a sacrifice for this mortals lot. He prophecies the
dangerous brink on which one day the embodied Force will stand, to
win all or lose all for man. She will stand there :
Carrying the worlds future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
(p.461)
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.
Savitri has discovered love. She met Satyavan in the Shalwa forest
and they have decided to be together. They have found their ancient
identity and there is no power that can cut the relationship apart. But
Narad also sees the panther doom hiding in that shadowy place
and thinks it appropriate to make Savitri aware of it. She has discovered
love; she must know death also. He tells in unequivocal terms that
Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;
This day returning Satyavan must die.
(p. 431)
Or, as it is told in the Mahabharata story, savatasarema
33

kshinayurlehanyasm karisyati, his life weakened here Satyavan

will die at the end of the year. And there is nothing which can stop
it. Satyavan must dietolls the bell throughout the epic. Narad
has made it known. He has the ability to see all the three divisions of
time, past-present-future, and he thinks it wise to inform the concerned
about this death. He also tells emphatically that this death is the spirits
opportunity, that this is a welcome death. With it Savitri becomes
aware of the future and begins with it her Yoga.
Narad is attracted by the golden summer earth and he decides to
make a visit there. But this attraction seems to be rather paradoxical.
He is accustomed to move on the paths of the immortals, the celestial
paths, and now he opts to go to a place where only toil and quest
and grief and hope prevail. What kind of attraction does he feel
for such a place, for a world of toil and grief? A world where is
played the see-saw game of death and life? This earth is full of labour,
packed with pain, this earth is a narrow house of sorrow and suffering.
The Buddha spoke of distress and desire, duhkha and trishna.
Self-denying devotees have called it duhkhalaya, this life filled with
agony, the cycles of birth and death repeating endlessly, without any
prospect of escape. Shankara the illustrious Mayavadins cry was
heart-piercing: idi samsaram bahuduhkham. For Schopenhauer life
was essentially tragic. Keats has a romantic-poignant phrase in his
Hyperion, this nest of pain. Indeed, this place seems to be so,
hurtful and unhappy. And the archetypal cosmic is brought out more
forcefully by Savitris this haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain.
It is interesting to compare the last two characterisations, en passant,
in terms of their literary aspects: If this nest of pain is intenselyrical, this haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain is majestically
wide-epical. If one belongs to the emotive-individual, the other has a
vast cosmic sweep, full of anguish yet filled with soothing peace. In
the line this haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain each word is
in its perfect place and nothing can be interchanged; nor can we
have, for instance, this den of Ignorance instead of this haunt
of Ignorance. There is in it also an assuring optimism that makes
the description as if less frightening to us. This mortal world is full of
labour and pain and travail, and yet there is the attraction for it! Narad
34

feels a kind of compulsion to visit it. What could be that compulsion?

What is that attraction?
Attracted by the golden summer-earth
He passed from the immortals happy paths
To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
To these rooms of a see-saw game of death and life.
Narad stands for the expression of Divine Love and
Knowledge, Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter. If Narad brings with
him the knowledge of the death that Savitri has to meet, he also
comes with love to meet her, to pay his respects to her. She is his
main attraction here. Indeed, it is Savitris presence here on earth
which makes the earth attractive. The presence of the supreme Shakti
in the physical is something most unusual, exceptional, something
which even the gods and goddesses cherish to behold. We know
what the Mother has said about her appearance at the Balcony or at
the time of giving blessings in the Meditation Hall. She has also spoken
a number of times of Durga visiting her during Puja days, and this
went on for several years. She said that gods and goddesses used to
crowd the sky to have her Darshan. It was a privilege for them to
see her. Surely these gods and goddesses must have crowded the
Shalwa forest also when Savitri and Satyavan met there for the first
time. Presently, Savitri is most beautiful in the joy of her discovery of
love. I think it must have been a privilege, a fulfilment for Narad to
have Savitris Darshan at this moment of time. No surprise that he
just hastens to earth! He undertakes the difficult task of assuming a
physical form to meet her.
Narad leaves his home in Paradise, crosses the expanse of brilliant
peace, passes through the large and lustrous air, past the immortals
happy paths until he is here, in the world of grief and toil and quest and
hope. The soul-space is left behind and from the world of Mind he has
stepped into material things. He sees here around the work of the
inconscient Self and the somnambulist Force, Achetana Purusha and
Andhah Prakriti. Finally there is his communion with the dumb Spirit.
While Narad is descending down these lower and lower regions
he is also chanting the Name, narayana-narayana. Etymologically,
35

narayana means nara-ayana, where man moves, towards where

he goes, that part, destination, place, object of attainment. That is
what he has to be. So Narads visit to Aswapati is in that context of
narayana-hood.
But does Narad leave his home with the definite intention of visiting
Aswapati, holding a kind of responsibility, a certain charge? Or is it
that while he is moving around, chanting the name of Vishnu, he sees
the golden summer earth and decides on the visit? Attraction or the
set mission? Drift or direction? But both in the deeper sense are, I
suppose, inseparable, they are one and the same, the mission and the
attraction.
Attracted by the golden summer-earth
He passed from the immortals happy paths
To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
To these rooms of a see-saw game of death and life.
The deeper sense is connected with the see-saw game of death and
life. I think this is very significant. It is more significant than the
trouble and turmoil in which we live here, in these narrow rooms. But
is it see-saw game of death and life or is it see-game of death
with life? There is a considerable difference between the two. The
latest edition of Savitri has see-saw game of death with life. We
know that the Book of Fate was started in 1945 and completed in
about a year. It was done practically by dictation. Therefore the seesaw game of death and/with life line belongs to the dictated
passage. It seems that in the dictated manuscript the phrase is game
of death with life. When this was copied, with was represented
by a shorthand symbol. The typescript made from this has game of
death and life. Did the typist change or mistake the shorthand
symbol for with to and? This could be. But it could also be that
the matter was referred to the author, a possibility which cannot be
off-hand dismissed. In any case, the benefit of the doubt must be
given to him, as this was not altogether unusual.
But let us see the implications of and which seems to be more
appropriate. After all, Death sprang up as a dark answer from the
36

Inconscience when Life entered the material world. We have a

number of references to this effect in Savitri. Thus, Savitri tells the
dark ironic critic of Gods work that she now knows that
The great stars burn with my unceasing fire
And life and death are both its fuel made.
Life only was my blind attempt to love:
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory....

(p. 638)

The Mother in her talk dated 8 September 1965 explains the passage
as follows.
Here Savitri maintains that LIFE ONLY was her attempt
to love. It was a blind attempt, and so limited to life
only. But it was IN DEATH that she won the victory.
Until so far she lacked Death and she has to conquer
Death in order to conquer Life. Thats the idea.
Would not these nuances be lost in the phrase game of death with
life? Death must be vanquished; there must be no more Death. In
the sequel, it is the principle of Love that is transformed into flame
and finally into light. It is the flame that is transformed into light. It is
that which materialises and not the other way around. Which also
means that such a transformation is the climbing of Death to
Immortality, as we have in this passage :
He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,
Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,
All shaping without will or thought or sense,
Its blind unerring occult mystery,
And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality.
(p. 416)
But let us move on; let us trace the journey that was undertaken by
Narad. It is a long journey. It starts with the spiritual, Narad as Man
divine; finally it culminates in the material, Narad walking into the
37

palace hall assuming a human body. He prepares himself to take the

physical form in which he shall enter the palace hall. He has crossed
the soul-space, and from Mind moved into material things. And then
Below him circling burned the myriad suns.
The myriad suns burning below him, these are the suns which govern
the process of the spiritual becoming the material. Narad knows the
alchemy and prepares himself to undergo the transmutation. He does
it by the Sankhya process of materialisation. The Mother says it is a
difficult process; it is a painful process also. Narad is willing to undergo
the whole sequence. He has an attraction and he has a mission to
carry out. And he is willing to pay the price required for that. He is a
slave of God and so, it is his Gods work he is doing. He accepts
the difficulty. He accepts the travail. So Narad is here in the company
of Aswapati. He is here just before the return of Savitri from the
Shalwa woods. He has timed his visit well.
But what are these myriad suns? If the stars twinkle in the night, our
sun blazes in the day. For the astronomer there is only one sun in the
sky; the rest are all stars, millions and millions of them, of all sizes
and all luminosities. Narad does not see them. His journey is in the
day, and he is attracted by the golden summer earth. So what are
these myriad suns?
In Savitri the word suns as plural appears 45 times, in the
revised edition 46 times. There are dazzling suns, magnificent
suns, mystic suns, living suns, cosmic suns, deathless suns,
purple suns, and so on and so forth. There are also unreal suns,
misleading suns, material suns. We have also the thousand suns
of the Gita, divi suryasahastrasya bhavedyugapadutthita, (X:12).
This was the verse quoted by Oppenheimer, the leader of the Atomic
Project during the Second World War. He was witnessing the firstever atomic explosion on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo. With that
success Oppenheimer became the American Prometheus.
Let us have a brief look at the occurrence of suns in Savitri. This
is interesting in many ways and possibly it can prove to be profitable
as well. The yogi-poet is using the plural suns very consciously.
38

There is undoubtedly a purpose in it. We have right in the beginning

the following passage:
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.

(p.1)

But the most beautiful is this:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.

(p.314)

The Sun from which we kindle all our suns.

And then, There are vasts of vision and eternal suns. (p.
659) It is interesting to note that we have vasts of vision and
unrealised Vasts, vasts as plural. In Savitri it appears 35 times.
So do infinities 6 times, and eternities 9 times. We have 3
calms, such as :
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.

(p. 346)

What are these calms? Possibly, there is the calm of knowledge, and
the calm of joy, and of beauty, love, passion, the calm of strength,
wisdom, skill, perfection, harmony. In the Future Poetry there are
five Suns of Poetrythe Sun of Truth, the Sun of Beauty, the Sun of
Delight, the Sun of Life, and the Sun of the Spirit. There are also five
Roses: Rose of Bliss, Rose of Light, Rose of Power, Rose of Life,
39

and Rose of Love. The ancient 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.
Emperor Akbar got compiled a list of one thousand names of
the sun for prayers four times in a day, morning, noon, evening, and
midnight. There is also the complete yogic-physical exercise, SuryaNamaskar. A set of Surya-Namaskars has twelve names of the Sun
whose powers are invoked while doing it; the set can be repeated a
number of times depending upon ones capacity.
Well, this all-pervasiveness of the sun is understandable.
However, let us quickly see some of the spiritual aspects of the Sun.
In the Isha Upanishad there is the invocation to the Sun for the
revelatory knowledge by whose action we can arrive at the highest
truth. In the Secret of the Veda Sri Aurobindo explains that the Sun,
Surya, is the seer, the revealer. His Truth takes into its illumination all
forms of things. But the significant description is about the eighth son
of Aditi, Martanda. He should appeal to us more than the other ones.
We are told that by seven she moves to the gods, but the eighth son
is Martanda, of the mortal creation; with the seven she moves to the
gods, to the supreme life, the original age of the gods. But Martanda
is brought back out of the Inconscient into which he had been cast;
he presides over mortal birth and death. Arisen this sun mounts to the
supramental Truth. This is the Vedic way of narrating the Savitristory, the household story as we have in the Mahabharata. The story
has a splendid charge, the charge of the mortal world becoming divine.
In it Satyavan is subject to death. In the Mothers language, he is the
divine Love who plunged into the depth of the Inconscience when
the horror of separation from the supreme Source was perceived.
Satyavanhe is the permanent Avatar, says she.
But what about the seven sons with whom Aditi moves to the
supreme life? Are they not the seven Suns of the Supermind? In the
Vedic experience Supermind as the creator in its manifold aspects in
the unity of the Transcendent is what the Sun represents. These
40

seven suns belong to that description. Sri Aurobindo lists them with
further details about their actions in the yogic centres of the subtle
body. These are:
The Sun of Supramental Truth,Knowledge-Power
originating the supramental creation. Descent into the
Sahasradala.
The Sun of Supramental Light and Will-Power, transmitting
the Knowledge-Power as dynamic vision and command to
create, found and organise the supramental action. Descent
into the Ajna Chakra, the centre between the eyes.
The Sun of Supramental Word, embodying the KnowledgePower, empowered to express and arrange the supramental
creation. Descent into the Throat Centre.
The Sun of Supramental Love, Beauty, and Bliss, releasing
the Soul of the Knowledge-Power to vivify and harmonise
the supramental creation. Descent into the Heart-Lotus.
The Sun of Supramental Force dynamised as a power and
source of life to support the supramental creation. Descent
into the Navel Centre.
The Sun of Life-Radiances (Power-Rays) distributing the
dynamis and pouring it into concrete formations. Descent
into the Penultimate Centre.
The Sun of Supramental Substance-Energy and FormEnergy empowered to embody the supramental life and
stabilise the creation. Descent into the Muladhara.
Could these be the suns seen by Narad while passing from Mind into
material things? No, his suns burned below the soul-space. The
Supramental Suns are the Transcendental Suns. Narad has crossed
the soul-space and he sees below him circling these myriad suns.
Possibly these myriad suns could be the reflections of the Supramental
Suns, not they themselves directly burning here in the Sankhya world
of material creation.
Narad is about to enter into the etheric sea, and just there burn these
myriad suns. They appear to govern the transition from the spiritual
into the material. This is a difficult process; a painful process also,
41

the spiritual becoming the material. In fact, at the moment there is no

mechanism for the Supramental Suns to enter directly into the earthly
physical. There is no mechanism by which the superman divine can
become man on earth. It looks paradoxical that the spiritual can
become the physical, but not the supramental. One day it will happen;
but it cannot happen at the present juncture. Manomaya Purusha is
not ready to receive or give rise to Vijnanamaya Purusha. The Rishis
cry is for the supramental Sun to bring to us the great Light, to bring
in that strength the vast mass of bliss; he prays for vision upon vision
of the beatitude to break upon us. But it cannot yet take itself a
physical form. That was the work the Mother was busy with.
Let us go back to the passage describing Narad undergoing the
spiritual-material Sankhya transition. Let us read it again:
Below him circling burned the myriad suns:
He bore the ripples of the etheric sea;
A primal Air brought the first joy of touch;
A secret Spirit drew its mighty breath,
Contracting and expanding this huge world
In its formidable circuit through the Void;
The secret might of the creative fire
Displayed its triple power to build and form,
Its infinitesimal wave-sparks weaving dance,
Its nebulous units grounding shape and mass,
Magic foundation and pattern of a world,
Its radiance bursting into the light of stars;
He felt a sap of life, a sap of death;
Into solid Matters dense communion
Plunging and its obscure oneness of forms
He shared with a dumb Spirit identity.
We have here the five classical elements appearing in succession:
Ether Air Fire Water Earth, or Akash Vayu Agni Apas
Prithvi. These are the well-known five irreducibles of Matter,
panchamahabhutas, the Great Five Elements, fundamental elements
but not to be confused with the elements of modern science. There
are plentiful Vedic descriptions associated with these five elements.
42

The five qualities attributed to them are: Sound Contact Form

Fluidity Solidity, Shabda Sparsha Roopa Rasa Gandha.
We might combine this description with the Puranic description.
In the Puranas Vishnu is depicted in different forms, each
corresponding to one of the five elements. The names he assumes
are, respectively: Vasudeva Sankarshana Pradyumna Aniruddha
Narayana. The associated objects are: Conch Discus Mace
Lotus Globe, Shankha Chakra Gada Padma Prithvi. The
first four are in the four hands of Vishnu and the fifth, Prithvi or
Earth or Globe, is between his two feet.
With the five elements there is also the Greek association. These
five elements are linked with the five Platonic solids as follows: Ether
= Dodecahedron; Air = Octahedron; fire = Tetrahedron; Water =
Icosahedron; Earth = Cube.
Perhaps you are aware that there has been an extensive study
made with respect to these five elements in different occult-spiritual,
religious, as well as in secular systems. But let us take just one
example, from Miltons Paradise Lost, Book III. It belongs to the
story of creation narrated by the deep theological mind. In it Uriel
narrates to Satan how, at the command of the Creator the great
World-Order arose out of Confusion:
I saw when at his Word the formless Mass,
This worlds material mould, came to a heap:
Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar
Stood ruld, stood vast infinitude confind;
Till at his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shon, and order from disorder sprung:
Swift to their several Quarters hasted then
The cumbrous Elements, Earth, Flood, Aire, Fire,
And this Ethereal quintessence of Heavn
Flew upward, spirited with various forms,
That rowld orbicular, and turned to Starrs
Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move;
Each had his place appointed, each his course,
The rest in circuit walles this Universe.
The Angel Uriel is the Regent of the Sun, the Light of God. He is one
43

of the seven Spirits that stand within the sight of God. But he is
beguiled to speak jubilantly about the works of the Creator in order to
glorify him. Obviously, Uriel is an overmental being.
Well, this Sankhya description of Matter-formation is all fine, but
what about the method by which the material creation can come into
existence? Narad knows it and he adopts it for his purpose.
Materialisation of the spiritual is yet a mystery to us. However, we
can get some idea of it from what Sri Aurobindo has explained at a
number of places. He has given details in the Essays on the Gita,
The Life Divine, in his writings on the Upanishads, in the Letters,
and in fact in Savitri on several occasions. But let us read what he
has written in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad. He writes:
vibration of conscious being is presented to itself by
various forms of sense which answer to the successive
operations of movement in its assumption of form. For
first we have intensity of vibration creating regular
rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative
formation; secondly, contact or intermiscence of the
movements of conscious being which constitute the
rhythm; thirdly, definition of the grouping of movements
which are in contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant
welling up of the essential force to support in its
continuity the movement that has been thus defined;
fifthly, the actual enforcement and compression of the
force in its own movement which maintains the form that
has been assumed. In Matter these five constituent
operations are said by the Sankhyas to represent
themselves as five elemental conditions of substance,
the etheric, atmospheric, igneous, liquid and solid; and
the rhythm of vibration is seen by them as Shabda,
sound, the basis of hearing, the intermiscence as
contact, the basis of touch, the definition as shape, the
basis of sight, the upflow of force as Rasa, sap, the
basis of taste, and the discharge of the atomic
compression as Gandha, odour, the basis of smell. It is
true that this is only predicated of pure or subtle Matter;
44

the physical matter of our world being a mixed operation

of force, these five elemental states are not found there
separately except in a very modified form.
(The Upanishads 1981 ed. p.152-53)

In an interview with Pavitra, dated 8 May 1926, Sri Aurobindo explains

as follows:
In the West the higher minds are not turned towards spiritual
truth but towards material science. The scope of science is
very narrow: it touches only the most exterior part of the
physical plane. And even there, what does science really know?
It studies the functioning of the laws, edificates theories ever
renewed and each time held up as the last word of truth. We
had recently the atomic theory, now comes the electronic.
According to the experience of ancient Yogis, sensible
matter was made out of five elements, bhutani: Prithvi,
Apas, Agni (Tejas), Vayu, Akasha.
Agni is threefold:
1. ordinary fire, Jala Agni,
2. electric fire, Vaidyuta Agni,
3. solar fire, Saura Agni.
Science has only entered upon the first and the second of
these fires. The fact that the atom is like the solar system
could it lead it to the knowledge of the third. Beyond Agni
is Vayu of which science knows nothing. It is the support
of all contact and exchange, the cause of gravitation and of
the fields (magnetic and electric). By it, the action of Agni,
the formal element, builder of forms, is made possible. And
beyond Vayu is the ether, Akasha. But these constitute only
the grossest part of the physical plane. Immediately behind
is the physical-vital, the element of life buried in matter. J.
C. Bose is contacting this element in his experiments.
Beyond is the mind of matter. This mind has a far different
form than the human mind, still it is a manifestation of the
same principle of organisation. And deep below there are
two more hidden layers. That is the occult knowledge
45

concerning the physical plane only. Science is far behind

this knowledge. Apas is the element that makes life
possiblethe desire which is the source of lifeAgni is
the element which renders form possible and Prithvi is the
compacting element which concretises.
Narad takes a physical form by exercising his spiritual will. We have
to understand that there can be different agents entering into the
play. There can be mental will, vital, or even physical will. There can
be the will of the luminous knowledge-being also, or that of the spiritual
self; it could be a free souls will. But in all the situations the five
great elements, panchamahabhutas, are the basic ingredients of
the bodily existence. Each has its characteristic form; each has its
own functional role, its own modus operandi. The Avatar uses his
supreme Will and comes here by projecting his higher Prakriti into
the lower. A free being can prepare a form or body using his spiritual
will. Narad is one such. But in all the cases there is replication of the
grand process by which the Spirit becomes Matter, attains communion
with it. Narads godly form, devarupam, has now become the form
of man, manuyarupam. This is a form which can be easily recognised
by us, and it is in it that he makes his entry into the palace of Aswapati.
I think, we may quickly look here into another aspect, the aspect
related to the Mothers work. She made an important discovery which
she disclosed on 1 July 1970. She said that it is the psychic being
which will materialise itself and become the supramental being. It is
the psychic being which survives death. So, if it materialises itself, it
means the abolition of death. The Mothers new body was aimed at
that. Perhaps that is the process. Now it is the New Body which will
do whatever is to be done. It is not an inert lump of matter; it is
charged with luminous dynamism of the Divine. It is going to exert
pressure upon the material in the evolutionary process.
There are also other aspects, of the Chakras or the centres of
occult energy in the subtle-physical body. Man is presently endowed
with seven Chakras only. But two Chakras below the feet and three
above his head have yet to get formed and become operative. This is
what the Mother was told by Thon. It was her experience too. For
these Chakras to come into operation it is necessary to do another
46

type of occult-spiritual yoga-tapasya. It is only then that the physical

can respond to the working of the higher consciousness-force. This
indeed became the main thrust of the Mothers yoga-tapasya during
the last fifteen years or so of her work.
Narad has no idea about these aspects, though he is aware of the
dangerous brink, of the moment when all will be won or all will be
lost for man. Narad is a spiritual being stationed high above; he is an
overmental being and his concern, his operation is in that relationship
only, in its possibilities. In fact, had he been a supramental being he
would not have been able to come here and visit Aswapati.
By the end of Book Six the heavenly sage from Paradise has
accomplished his task: he has delivered the Word of Fate; he has
justified the ways of God to Man, proclaimed the bright prospects of
ecstasy and transfiguration. He had timed his visit well, reaching
Aswapatis palace in Madra just one hour before the return of the
princess. Narad has done his job ably and now he is ready to depart,
to go back to his home in Paradise.
He spoke and ceased and left the earthly scene.
Away from the strife and suffering on our globe,
He turned towards his far-off blissful home.
A brilliant arrow pointing straight to heaven,
The luminous body of the eternal seer
Assailed the purple glory of the noon
And disappeared like a receding star
He has returned with the epic speed of sight and sound. But the
stamp of his mission is permanent in the spiritual chronicles of the
earth. He has gone, but still
A high and far imperishable voice
Chanted the anthem of eternal love.

(p. 462)

Having completed his mission, which is a threefold assignment, the

sage goes back to his happy and agreeable country, istam desam, as
the Mahabharata would say. He must have resorted to the same
47

technique by which he had prepared his physical form. The dissolution

of that form must be by the reverse Sankhya process of
materialisation.
On his way to the earth Narad sang five songs. During the return
journey it is the anthem of eternal love that he is singing. While coming
down he saw the cosmic Being, Virat Purusha, at his cosmic task.
He sang of Ignorance and Fate; he sang the name of Vishnu and the
birth; he sang of darkness yearning towards the eternal Light, and
death that climbs to immortality; he sang of the Truth that cries from
Nights blind deeps, and consciousness waking in beasts and men;
He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.
And as he sang the demons wept with joy
Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task
And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,
And glad release from their self-chosen doom
And return into the One from whom they came. (p.416-17)
The four great Asuras who had gone very far away from the Supreme,
who had separated themselves from the Supreme, are now happy to
return to the Supreme. Narad is singing the arrival of such a moment.
Such is the power of Narads song: that the demons should weep
with joy. When did he compose that song? Or who composed that
song for him? We do not know. How long it must have taken for
Narad to sing the five songs? Perhaps four hours. Could that be the
time Narad had taken to travel from his home in Paradise to
Aswapatis palace? Could that be the time for the spiritual to become
the physical? But let me leave these questions for you to answer. At
the time of his departure he simply says: Let noble and auspicious
things be to all! sarvesam bhadram astu vah! Let us simply say,
Salutations to Narad! Salutations to Narad!
48

Vedic symbols in Savitri

Sri Aurobindo on Symbols
A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents
a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation....
But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of
our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality.
There are, however, different kinds of symbols:
l. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with
objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because
the same word 'go' meant both ray and cow, and because the cow
was their most precious possession which maintained their life and
was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once
created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it
became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an
image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite
symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy
were quite evident.
2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially
chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but
derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the
surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients
the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level,
peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the
facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar
idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a
railway-trip.
3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their
own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading
eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning.
Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine
Gnosis.
4. Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets.
Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful.
49

Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my

experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it
came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it
came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations.
In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the
symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together
in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations
concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no
doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into
mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they
are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these
symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them;
they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same
symbol may also express many different ideas.
(Letters on Yoga SABCL 22-23-24, p. 954-55)

A symbol expresses not the play of abstract things or ideas put into
imaged form, but a living truth or inward vision or experience of things,
so inward, so subtle, so little belonging to the domain of intellectual
abstraction and precision that it cannot be brought out except through
symbolic images the more these images have a living truth of their
own which corresponds intimately to the living truth they symbolise,
suggests the very vibration of the experience itself, the greater becomes
the art of the symbolic expression. When the symbol is a representative
sign or figure and nothing more, then the symbolic approaches nearer
to an intellectual method, though even then it is not the same thing as
allegory. In mystic poetry the symbol ought to be as much as possible
the natural body of the inner truth or vision, itself an intimate part of the
experience.
(SABCL 9:361)
here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the
canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real
symbol of an inner reality, and the main purpose is to describe by
suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience
broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a
brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving
behind the day of ordinary human consciousness in which the
prophecy has to be worked out.
(Letters on Savitri)
50

Night And Dawn (Part I)

Comparative Studies of Vedic Imagery
in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
By Vladimir Iatsenko
Vladimir is a researcher working at Savitri Bhavan. These notes
are based on a chapter from a study which we hope to publish in
book form soon.
There are many myths in the Veda which describe the Beginning of
Creation from different angles or stages. Some of them start with
the description of the Supreme Person, Atman, Self,1 others of the
Impersonal Spirit, Brahman,2 some start from Nothingness or
Darkness, 3 which they call night, ratri, or apas, apraketam
salilam4 dark waters, or sometimes as mrityu5, death, etc. They
all refer to different stages of Creation, where Darkness or
Nothingness was depicted as our beginning, but not as our Origin.
We can easily reconcile these myths, knowing that Darkness was
the result of the Fall of the Supreme Light, (Involution). 6
The Origin of Night. The Night was born from the Truth, as the
outcome of the Supreme Consciousness-Power, Tapas, and from the
Night then all the Manifestation came into being:
ta ca satya cbhddht tapaso dhyajyata
tato rtry ajyata tata samudro arava
From Tapas the Law and the Truth were born,
From there the Night was born, and from there the
Waters of Ocean!7
samudrd aravd adhi samvatsaro ajyata
ahortri vidadhad vivasya miato va
sry-candramasau dht yathprvam akalpayat
divam ca pthivm cntarikam atho sva
From the Waters of the Ocean the Year was born the
Lord of all cyclic changes. The Creator established Days
51

and Nights, fashioned accordingly the Sun and the

Moon, Heaven and Earth and the Space in between,
and then Svar. 8
There are many passages in Savitri which have a similar view, that
Night is a passage on the path rather than the ultimate origin of things:
It was the hour before the gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence marge.9
The word across implies that the path of the divine Event was
before and will continue after the Night has passed, it is neither original
nor final. As later Sri Aurobindo will say in Savitri:
Night is not our beginning nor our end;
We came to her from a supernal Light,
By Light we live and to the Light we go.10
This divine Event symbolizes the realization of His Original Intent to
become Another,11 to become Many,12 to experience Himself in Unity
and not only in His Supreme Identity, in the words of the Mother.
Therefore Night was seen as a device, so to say, to shape out the
otherness of self, and once that can stay constantly in time and space
as the Psychic Being, the Night will not be needed any longer and
will be over-passed.
According to the Veda there are actually two Nights13: one is born
from the Truth, and other is created later by Time (a Year) together
with a Day. In both cases the Rishis use the same word Ratri.
Sri Aurobindo explains this phenomenon in The Secret of the Veda:
Utter Night out of which the worlds arise is the symbol of the
Inconscient. That is the inconscient Ocean, that the darkness
concealed within darkness out of which the One is born by the
greatness of His energy. But in the world of our darkened mortal
view of things there reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which
envelops heaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physical
consciousness and our vital being.14
52

These later nights says Sri Aurobindo are other than those utter
darknesses which are dreaded as the occasion of the enemy, the haunt
of the demons of division who devour; these are rather the pleasant
nights, the divine and blessed ones who equally labour for our growth.15
Some special characteristics of Night.
Hiranyastupa Angirasa while invoking different Gods for help and
assistance calls also for Night. It is Night, who introduces a soul to
the world, or rather, provides a place for a soul in this Manifestation:
hvaymyagni prathama svastaye
hvaymi mitrvaruvihvase
hvaymi rtr jagato nivean
hvaymi deva savitram taye
I call for Agni first, for well-being!
I call for Mitra-Varuna for protection here!
I call for Night, (as) the entrance to the manifest world!
I call for God Savitar, for (his) assistance. 16
The word nivean literally means introducer to or founder of,
from the Causative of root ni-vi, to enter into, to descend, to settle
down, to be founded. So the Rishi calls for Night to help him get his
foundation in Manifestation, to get his place here in the world.
The inconscient world is the spirits self-made room,17
The Night was also seen like a robe or a cloak, a garment for the
One dwelling within:
apa k nirija devy va
The Goddess (Dawn) has thrown away the black garments.18
The Wisdom was near, disguised by its own works,
Of which the darkened universe is the robe. 19
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the worlds blind immensity to sight.
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god. 20
In this light it is interesting to review the first stanza of the Isha
Upanishad:
53

 vsyam idam sarvam yat kimca jagatym jagat

All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatever exists
in the Universe21
where vsyam, future passive participle from root vas, can be
translated as (1) that which should be or will be inhabited, (2) worn
(as a garment) or (3) illumined by the Lord from within. From the
last meaning to shine (ucchati, uvsa, etc.) the name uas, dawn,
and vasu, a class of shining gods, is derived. So the first verse of
Isha Upanishad implies that all this is to be illumined, glorified
by the Lord from within.
Thus the Night conceals the Spirit the wonderful fire22 within her
robe, working out the Mystery of the Supreme taking on material form.
A fire in the Night is its mighty actions blaze.

23

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.

24

So the most secret function of Night is to nurse the Future Miracles

of Light:
Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.25
Sri Aurobindo comments on the nature of the Night in the Vedas :
Night holds hidden in her bosom her luminous sister26
rtr vi akhyad yat / purutr dev akabhi / viv adhi
riyodhita
urv apr amarty / nivato devy udvata / jyoti
bdhate tama
The Night, approaching, looked wide with (her many) eyes,
she put on all the glories!
The Goddess Immortal has filled the wide space, the depths
and the hights! She oppresses Darkness with Light.27
54

The Night is opposing tamas, the ultimate Darkness, with the light of
her sister Dawn concealed within her. She establishes it here in the
Darkness:
nir u svasram askta / uasa devy yat / aped u
hsate tama
The Goddess, approaching, hid her sister Dawn, and away
indeed the darkness will go!28
Night and Dawn.
The Vedic symbol of two sisters Night and Dawn (naktoshasau) is
therefore crucial for understanding the symbolism of spiritual evolution
and of the two oceans of the superconscient and the inconscient,
Heaven and Earth, the concept of Knowledge and Ignorance (vidya
and avidya), and the Vedic myths of Creation, where Night was
seen as a means of shaping out the Multitude by impregnating the
light into the darkness. Night has therefore a divisive character; it
divides, separates and shapes the oneness into manifoldness in terms
of providing it with a specific separate context: body (residential place
and instrumentation). Night and Dawn are two sisters doing the same
work, having the same Intention:
idam reha jyoti jyotir gc citra praketo
ajania vibhv
yath prast savitu savya ev rtry uase yonim
raik
ruadvats ruat vety gd raik k sadanny asy
samnabandh amte anc dyv vara carata
minne
samno adhv svasror anantas tam anyny carato
devaie
na methete na tasthu sumeke naktos samanas virpe
The best of Lights has come, the beautiful vision is widely
born!
As if compelled by Savitar the Night has vacated her
Womb to the Dawn.
Shining, with the shining Calf, the White she has come,
and the Black vacated for her (their) common places of
dwelling.
55

(For they are) bound together, (both) Immortal, following

each other! Day and Night are moving (always) changing
(only) the colour!
Common is the Infinite Path of these two sisters, they move
on orderly (as they were) taught by God (Savitar)!
They do not mix with each other, they do not stop their
movement, being perfectly measured, the Night and Dawn
have the same Mind, differ (only) in form.29
Sri Aurobindo writes: Night and Dawn are then of different forms
but one mind and suckle alternately the same luminous Child. Then
the revealing lustres of the brighter goddess are known in the pleasant
nights even through the movements of the darkness. Therefore Kutsa
hymns the two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover, agreeing,
they move over heaven and earth forming the hue of the Light;
common is the path of the sisters, infinite; and they range it, the one
and the other, taught by the gods; common they, though different
their forms. For one is the bright Mother of the herds, the other the
dark Cow, the black Infinite, who can yet be made to yield us the
shining milk of heaven.30
Sri Aurobindo writes in The Secret of the Veda: Dawn daughter of
Heaven and Night her sister are obverse and reverse sides of the
same eternal Infinite.31
yv ca yad aru ca svasrau mahad devnm asuratvam ekam
The Dark and Red are the two sisters, which is One Great
Power of the Gods!32
pade iva nihite dasme antas tayor anyad guhyam vir anyat
sadhrcn pathy s vic mahad devnm asuratvam ekam
As if inside the wonderful secret place these two, whose one
(side) is hidden and the other is visible! The Path leads to one
aim in opposite directions! Great is the One Power of the
Gods!33

For Dawn in the Veda is the goddess symbolic of new openings of

divine illumination on mans physical consciousness. She alternates
with her sister Night; but that darkness itself is a mother of light and
always Dawn comes to reveal what the black-browed Mother has
prepared.34
56

Dawn and Night are shaping out a whole variety of things in

Manifestation:
nn cakrte yamy vapi tayor anyad rocate kam anyat

The Twins have made all varieties of forms; the one is

shining and the other is black.35
Sri Aurobindo writes: But this great work is to be done according to
the ordered gradations of the Truth, in its fixed seasons, by the twelve
months of the sacrifice, by the divine years of Surya Savitri. Therefore
there is a constant rhythm and alternation of night and dawn,
illuminations of the Light and periods of exile from it, openings up of
our darkness and its settling upon us once more, till the celestial Birth
is accomplished and again till it is fulfilled in its greatness, knowledge,
love and power.36
pady vaste pururp vapy rdhv tasthau tryavi rerih

The one, who is at the bottom, wears a wide variety of

shapes, and the other, who stands high, leaning to a
Protector of the three worlds! 37
They are the two cows full of nourishing milk, sudughe payasvat38,
dhen, fostering, feeding, dhpayete,39 the Divine Child growing in
time and space, a luminous calf ruadvats...; prv iu na mtar
rihne the two mothers full (of milk) kissing the baby.40
Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn
And the Everlasting puts on Times disguise.41
sa rocayaj janu rodas ubhe sa mtror abhavat putra dya
It is he who made them shine, by his birth, both the Rodasi
(Heaven and Earth), he became the Son of the Two Mothers,
most beloved.42

The gods also desire to sit on the lap of Night and Dawn:
v devso uat uanta urau sdantu subhage upasthe
The gods desire you two, o Desirous ones, let them sit on
your vast lap, o Blissful ones!43
For they are the two young mothers of the Truth: yahv tasya
mtar 44
57

Sri Aurobindo explains the profound psychological meaning behind their

symbolism and how easily it was misunderstood by the modern mind:
Dawn and Night, runs an impressive Vedic verse, two
sisters of different forms but of one mind, suckle the same
divine Child. We understand nothing. Dawn and Night are
of different forms, but why of one mind? And who is the
child? If it is Agni, the fire, what are we to understand by
Dawn and Night suckling alternately an infant fire? But the
Vedic poet is not thinking of the physical night, the physical
dawn or the physical fire. He is thinking of the alternations
in his own spiritual experience, its constant rhythm of periods
of a sublime and golden illumination and other periods of
obscuration or relapse into normal unillumined
consciousness and he confesses the growth of the infant
strength of the divine life within him through all these
alternations and even by the very force of their regular
vicissitude. For in both states there works, hidden or
manifest, the same divine intention and the same highreaching labour. Thus an image which to the Vedic mind
was clear, luminous, subtle, profound, striking, comes to us
void of sense or poor and incoherent in sense and therefore
affects us as inflated and pretentious, the ornament of an
inapt and bungling literary craftsmanship.45
(To be continued.)

Notes :
1
2
3
4

5
6
7
8

Aitareya Upanishad 1.1.1-4; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.1-3.;

Maitrayani Upanishad 6.17;
Rig Veda 10.129.1-2; Taittiriya Upanishad, 2.7; etc.
Rig Veda 10.129.1-2; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.5.1; Taittiriya
Aranyaka 1.23; Jaiminiya Upanishad 1.56.1, etc.
Brihadaranyaka Upahishad 1.2.1
Savitri p. 601, See also Rig Veda 10.190.1-2
Rig Veda 10.190.1
Rig Veda 10.190.2-3

58

Savitri, p.1
Savitri, p. 601
11
See Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.1-3: sa dvitIyam aicchat.
12
See Taittiriya Aranyaka, bahu sym.
13
Rig Veda 10.190
14
The Secret of the Veda, p. 481.
It is interesting to note that the word rtr, night, etymologically can be
derived from the root r, to grant, impart, yield, bestow, or from the root
ram , to rejoice, to rest, and can be translated as bestower of wealth, or
giving rest.
15
The Secret of the Veda, p. 482
16
Rig Veda 1.31.1
17
Savitri, p.601
18
Rig Veda, 1.113.14
19
Savitri, p. 313
20
Savitri, p. 3
21
Ishopanishad 1.1
22
Savitri, p. 314
23
ibid, p. 56
24
ibid, p. 679
25
ibid, p. 724
26
The Secret of the Veda, p. 482
27
Rig Veda 10.127.1-2
28
ibid, 10.126.3
29
ibid, 1.113.1-3
30
The Secret of the Veda, p. 482
31
ibid, p. 481
32
Rig Veda 3.55.11
33
ibid, 3.55.15
34
The Secret of the Veda, p. 273
35
Rig Veda, 3.55.11
36
The Secret of the Veda, p. 482
37
Rig Veda, 3.55.14. Cf. also about two primary hotars, where one is at the
navel of the Earth (in the altar, according to Sy.) and the other is abiding
over three hills, yajantau .. nbh pthivy adhi snuu triu, RV 2.3.7
38
RV 2.3.6
39
RV 3.55.12
40
RV 7.2.5
41
Savitri, p. 36
42
RV 3.2.2
43
RV 10.70.6
44
RV 1.142.7
45
Secret of the Veda, p. 365
9

10

59

Be wide in me, O Varuna;

Be mighty in me, O Indra;
O Sun, be very bright and luminous;
O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness.
Be fierce and terrible, O Rudra;
Be impetuous and swift, O Maruts;
Be strong and bold, O Aryama;
Be voluptuous and pleasurable, O Bhaga;
Be tender and kind and loving and passionate, O Mitra.
Be bright and revealing, O Dawn;
O Night, be solemn and pregnant.
O Life, be full, ready & buoyant;
O Death, lead my steps from mansion to mansion.
Harmonise all these, O Brahmanaspati.
Let me not be subject to these gods, O Kali.
SRI AUROBINDO
Essays Divine and Human, CWSA 12:429

60

Vedic Symbols in Sri Aurobindo's

Savitri
Talk by Professor R.L. Kashap
November 16, 2005
Vedanga Vidvan Dr. R.L. Kashyap is the Honorary Director of the
Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Culture (SAKSI) in
Bangalore. He is the author of many books on the Vedas, and is
passing his great learning on to the younger generation through
workshops and classes. But among Aurobindonians, he is also
known for his unique insights into Savitri. We were fortunate to
have him with us at Savitri Bhavan in November 2005.
Our topic this evening is the connection between Savitri and the
Veda.
When we speak of the Veda, we speak of the Veda mantras, the
Veda samhitas. They are four, by name : Rig Veda, Ajur Veda, Sama
Veda, Atharva Veda. But we are going to find again and again that it
was a single collection before it became four, and later, they are
overlapping collections. The Rig Veda, for which Sri Aurobindo wrote
many translations, has basically 10,552 mantras. Each verse is called
a mantra but not all verses are mantras ... I will come back to that
topic a little later. Since each is a couplet, we are talking about roughly
20,000 lines, and if we add other mantras, there are about 20,000
additional mantras, it is roughly 40,000 lines; Savitri is 24,000 lines.
So trying to connect the 24,000 lines of Savitri with the 40,000 lines
of the Veda in one hour, is like asking See India in 5 days and 2
hours that sort of thing. So please understand that what you are
going to get is just a few hints on this broad topic of how to connect,
how to understand the Veda.
A few words about myself : our Institute, the Sri Aurobindo Kapali
Sastry Institute of Vedic Culture, was started in 1997. I was in the
States for about 35 years. I got my PhD from Harvard, in 1965. I
was a Professor not of Vedas or Sanskrit, but of electrical and
computer engineering from 1966 to 1999. Thats a long time. It was
61

there in the States that I met Madhav Panditji. He gave me hints on

how to read Savitri, a long time ago, 25 years ago. In 1966 when I
had just finished my PhD, I had gone to a conference in Los Angeles.
It was not the first conference I had gone to, in the evening one of
my old friends was there, so we took a stroll, and we landed in a
secondhand bookshop. The bookseller saw my name, and he said
Sir, there are two very good books for you. One was Savitri, the
two volume Savitri with no introduction, just the pure text, the 1950
version. And the other was Sri Aurobindos Hymns to the Mystic
Fire. I bargained the price and took them home. I read a few lines of
Savitri. It didnt make much impression. Afterwards the whole thing
was opaque, therefore I kept it aside. Whenever I wanted to I turned
back to it, but only when I met Panditji in 77, he gave me some few
hints on how to handle Savitri. Thats all he gave, but it was sufficient
for me. Again, with the Veda the same problem: I read Sri Aurobindos
preface to Hymns to the Mystic Fire that was the other book I
bought that day. Again, it didnt make that much impression, because
he was saying that the Veda is a spiritual document. That was a
piece of information that I knew very well that the Veda is a spiritual
document, that the Vedic gods are not different things .... I had not
read anything of the opinions of the Indologists, therefore I was saved
by my ignorance and quite happy. Therefore to me what I read in Sri
Aurobindo didnt make all that much difference, except his English
and his translations which were not too transparent to me, so again
this book too was in some sort of a limbo. Then around 1965 I
became a professor at Purdue, and by 1969 I got my tenure, so I had
a little bit more time. Then I systematically began reading the Indian
Sanskrit works and that sort of thing. Of course the Upanishads, the
Veda, the Vedanta of Shankaracharya, then I came back to the Veda
and to Sri Aurobindos Savitri.
The first line of Savitri , as you know, runs :
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
But that too didnt create such a great impression on me, because
that is in some sense a fairly common idea. For example, when I was
a young person, an old lady behind our house used to sing a song in
Kannada. Basically it runs,
62

Get up, Narayana, get up!

Lakshmiramana, get up
Sri Venkateswara, get up!
What should you do? You should do samudra mathuna,
You should really start the whole process of creation,
You have to get up!
Therefore the idea of the gods waking up was not entirely new to
me. I read further in the book, The Issue and so on, but I was not
clear what is he getting across. Again the same problem with Savitri.
Of course, like everybody else I knew the outline of the story of
Savitri. Again that also didnt help.
When I met Madhav Panditji in 1977 he gave me two hints about
how to read Savitri. He said, Dont start from page 1 thats the
wrong place to go. Start from the middle of the book, the Book of Fate,
and the second part of it The Problem of Pain. Then go to the Book
of Yoga, then you can go back to the first page. The second thing he
said was You need to get a handle on the Veda, make sure that you
connect some of the earlier hymns in the Veda to the ideas in Savitri.
And especially, he said, the Worlds and that sort of thing. The most
important thing that he said was If you have to read and understand
the depths of the ideas in the Veda, you have to read Kapali Sastriars
Siddhanjala. The Siddhanjala is in four parts. The first part is an
introduction to the spiritual interpretation of the Veda. He is the only
person in the Sri Aurobindonian Circle who basically has refuted all the
criticisms against Sri Aurobindos interpretation of the Veda. He has
done that. He took the bull by the horns and went on explaining them
one by one. So Panditji told me, Only when you get a handle on that
will you really be able to understand. And he told me that Kapali
Sastriar has written a detailed commentary on the first 121 suktas.
Each sukta has about 10 mantras, so we are talking about 1200 mantras.
This was a big enough handle by which I could get a hold on the Vedas.
These two hints were sufficient for me. Just as he had suggested, I
started reading Savitri: the Book of Fate, the Problem of Pain, and the
Book of Yoga, and then I went back to Book One and found it very
fascinating, no problem at all, it was smooth sailing. Whenever I got
time I was reading the Veda also, the two went back and forth, so
those hints he had given me proved a great help in making a connection
between these two great texts.
63

So first of all let us get a little handle on the Veda. Unfortunately in

the Indian traditions, the word veda is used very loosely. It is
considered simply as knowledge. That is not what is meant here.
Rather it is meant to designate specific groups of mantras. A mantra
is not simply a verse. This is very important. We speak of the 10,000
mantras of the Rig Veda. Most of you will have read Sri Aurobindos
book The Future Poetry and also his various commentaries on Vedic
texts.
Each mantra has three components: there is the component of
sound. That is why we insist that it must be chanted properly because
each word has a power of its own. Second, each mantra has a meaning
artha. The meaning is not simply a composite of the words. Rather,
when you know the words and read it correctly there is an explosion
as it were in your mind. That is what the Sanskrit grammarians called
the sphota. That is the meaning. But why should we need both of
them? Because each mantra represents a revelation to the rishi of a
darshana, of, shall we say, a supraphysical event as it were. And
this mantra is a compressed version of that darshana. Therefore when
you recite it correctly, knowing its meaning, both of them, then the
decompression starts and the darshana becomes revealed to you.
Therefore we have to understand the points: why we have to recite
it properly, to take the trouble of knowing the meanings of the words,
and of course reading with devotion is an essential part of the thing,
then you get the darshana. So these are the three steps in the
understanding of the mantra. Whenever we speak of mantras, this is
the common factor of all of them.
That being the case, each mantra has its own power of suggestion.
Remember, the Rig Veda is not a prose composition. People say
there is heavy repetition. No, it is not repetition. The idea is that
when a poet wants to say certain things, he will take the latter half of
an existing mantra, introduce it as it were, repeat it as it were, and
then continue it. Therefore, when we speak of mantra, Sri Aurobindo
calls it the word of Illumination.
As you know, Sri Aurobindo had a favourite theory, that to understand
the Veda, you take each letter of the alphabet, the a, the i, the u, the
ri, and all of them, especially the vowels but also the consonants,
each gives as it were a root meaning of its own. It is from that you
have to understand the word, not really by what commentator A or
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what commentator B has said. For example, all the words which
start with ri deal with some aspect of the Truth, rta the truth in the
moment; rik illumination, rishva the power, etc. It is the same
thing for all of them. You take all the things connected with u - they
are all connected with something going up: udgita the mantra which
rises, udgata which goes up. Each vowel has a meaning of its
own. And that is how we have to capture and understand the Veda.
Let me come back to Savitri now.
Sometimes it is said that Sri Aurobindo started composing Savitri
during the early part of his stay in Baroda. But that does not really
make sense, for two reasons. First, there is one very strong piece of
evidence. In the Record of Yoga, in the second volume, in the undated
entries of 1912-13, there is a list of all the things Sri Aurobindo planned
to write, a big list; and Savitri is not in the list. Essays on the Gita is
there, Ilion is there, the Synthesis is there, The Life Divine is there,
but Savitri is not in that list. In 1914 Sri Aurobindo already started
writing The Life Divine, he started the Synthesis, he already started
on them. But there was no place in these works where he could in
some sense give his, shall we say intuitions, his illuminations, his
revelations on the details of the manifestation, details of the world.
We should always remember that again and again Sri Aurobindo says
that before he came to Pondicherry he had all the major experiences:
the experience of the purusha, nirguna, saguna, all of them, and
then he was asked, What is the reason you came to your yoga? He
said, My business is to understand the constitution of Man, the
constitution of the world, how is it made, and what are the connections
between them. Therefore he wanted, in some sense, to put them
down in a systematic way.
As you know, it is not correct to say that Sri Aurobindo got all his
inspiration from the Vedas and the Upanishads quite the contrary.
But in some sense, when he read a particular mantra of the Veda or
the Upanishads then it connected with his own revelations in some
sense, broadened them as it were, and therefore he had collected all
of these. To express all these insights he needed a vehicle, and for
that he chose Savitri.
The first mistake people can make regarding Savitri is to assume
that it deals with the story of Savitri as told in the Mahabharata, Vana
65

Parva. That is a fundamental mistake. It is true that the particular

sage, the particular person who recites to Yudhisthira the story about
the power of conjugal felicity, had the intuition of the Savitri story.
But most of you here will have read some lines of Savitri, and you
know that when the intuition comes in, it can be properly interpreted
only when it comes through the soundless corridors of the mind
a mind that is not cluttered up with pre-conceptions. When the
mind is cluttered with preconceptions, even when an intuition comes
what does it do? It is like on a post office desk: it puts its black
imprint over the beautiful stamp, and the whole thing is defaced. And
that is more or less what happened with the Savitri story.
Sri Aurobindo always says that when you go to the Veda or the
Upanishads or anything else, you have to pay particular attention to
the names. And what are the names in Savitri? There is Savitri,
Satyavan is almost a minor figure, and then we have Aswapati, and
of course we have Death. Savitris mothers name is not even
mentioned, even though she gives a long speech in Book Six. The
key figures are Aswapati and Savitri and Death. Sri Aurobindo
always uses the word Death. This is very important. He does not use
the name Yama, even though in the Indian tradition Yama is considered
the god of Death, because the two concepts are quite different. The
idea of Yama in the Veda is much more complicated. I will come
back to it in a minute.
What happened here in the Mahabharata story is that it was
made into a story of conjugal felicity. It is not about the power of
Death at all. You should understand how she gets the reprieve of
Satyavan. She asks for sons. Yama says You will have them. Then
she puts a technical point. She says, I am a chaste woman. So if my
husband Satyavan is not alive, how can I get the children? So Yama
consents and therefore releases her husband. Remember this is not
a victory over Death. It is what you may call, shall we say, you know
in English we say, if a prisoner is there, he is not permanently released
from prison, he is given a temporary release, on parole. So in the
Mahabharata version of the legend, Satyavan is only released on
parole. Afterwards he dies and the whole story continues. So the
rishi got the intuition, but interpreted it in a very narrow sense, the
sense of a power of prathivrata, the power of how a lady can save
her husbands life nothing more and nothing less.
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When Sri Aurobindo saw the name Aswapati it rang different

bells in his mind, in his consciousness, as you can see if you read his
commentary on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
Aswapati
The basic core of the mantras of the four Veda Samhitas Rig
Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda their period could
be 4,000 BC or even earlier. That was a period of great intuition. Of
course we cannot say that everybody living at that time had it; the
rishis had it, their disciples had it, but the ordinary mortals had some
exposure to it. Agni is the Lord of the Will, Indra is the Lord of the
Mind, Saraswati is the Goddess of Inspiration, Aditi is the Goddess
of Infinity ... they had their intuitions about it. That is the only way
that you can explain a fact which Sri Aurobindo hammers again and
again that all the greatest creativity in India can be traced back to
the Vedas and to no other source. Science, Art, Music, everything
else it is all in the Veda and all later developments are developments
out of that. That point Sri Aurobindo mentions in so many places.
The Vedic period may have lasted three or four thousand years or I
dont know how long, but like everything else, it had to degenerate. So
after it had come down, wise people said, You know, we have lost
something. Can we not recover the wisdom? The books which they
wrote are called the Brahmanas. Brahmana implies that it has to do
with the Cause. In the Vedas bramha means a mantra it is important
to remember this. At that time the Vedic rituals were very dominant,
therefore their main purpose was to understand the inner meaning of
the rituals the antaryagna. That was the purpose of the Brahmanas.
And they are interesting books, with a lot of stories, and this and that.
But people were not satisfied with that. They said, We need a little bit
more. And that more is Aranyaka. Aranya is normally translated as
forest. But that is not it. Rana in the Veda means delight. Ar, arya
always means effort the effort to distil the delight that is Aranya.
These aranyakas had a twofold role. One was the role of extending
the brahmana idea of interpreting the rituals; but most important was
the other role of understanding the meanings behind what we call the
secret words, the rahasya, and putting them in the language of the
intellect. The great weakness of the Veda is that it puts everything into
a symbolic language. That is its weakness and its strength. It is a strength
67

because it prevented other people defacing it; it is a weakness because

most people could not understand it. And the end of these Aranyakas
are the Upanishads. So when we think of the Veda books, it is not one
book. If we think of a simple matrix I hope most of you know what
a matrix is with four rows :

Types of Vedic Literature

Four by four. So we are speaking of 16 types of books very important

point.
For example, for the Rig Veda we have the Aitereya Brahmana,
Aitereya Aranyaka, Aitereya Upanishad; Kaushitaki Brahmana,
Kaushitaki Aranyaka and Kaushitaki Upanishad.
With Yajur Veda unfortunately it is more complicated. We have
the two recensions called the Krishna and Shukla Yajurveda. The
ones that belong to the Krishna Yajurveda are the Taittiriya mantra
samhita, Taittiriya Brahmana, Taittiriya Aranyaka, and the last part
of the Taittiriya Aranyaka is the Taittiriya Upanishad. Similarly the
Shukla Yajurveda has the Shukla Yajurveda mantra samhita, then it
has the famous Shatapatha Brahmana. It has no aranyaka. And the
last part of the Shatapatha Brahmana is the famous Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad. The Sama Veda has the Chhandogya Upanishad, and
Atharva Veda has all other Upanishads.
Therefore the Upanishads are in some sense correctly called veda
plus anta the end parts of the Veda except that they are written
in a language in which intellect plays a part, and not so much
symbolism is there.
Even though we speak of four major Upanishads, even though
we can speak of the 108 Upanishads there is a list of 108 twelve
are famous because Shankaracharya commented on them. But if
you take these twelve and bind them in a single book in Devanagari
script, you find one thing: the Brihadaranyaka occupies 100 pages,
68

Chhandogya occupies 100 pages, and all the others together occupy
65 pages. The point to understand here is that unless you get a handle
on these biggies, (Brihadaranyaka and Chhandogya), you are not
going to go very far although of course. the Isha Upanishad is very
great and Sri Aurobindo has commented upon it.
So one of Sri Aurobindos Five-Year Plans was to write a commentary
on the Upanishads also. He has not completed all of it. But the first
phrase of the Brihadaranyaka made a big impression on him: the problem
of aswa. In Sanskrit aswapati is there. We simply translate aswa as
horse, there is the end of it. No, no, no, that is a mistake.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad has six chapters, as it were, each
divided into several subsections, each subsection has several mantras,
I shall be quoting the first chapter, first section, first mantra. It
represents the aswa, the sacrificial horse, as the entire manifestation.
Aswasya medhasya shiraha
What is the face of it? Usha : Ushava ashwasya medhyasya shiraha.
Who is Usha? the sacrificial dawn. She is the face of it. Then what
is the sun? suryo chaksho : the sun is the eye of the horse. And so
it goes on : What is all the rain we get? It is the waste products of this
horse. And this is the entire horse of the manifestation.
So we should get a hint that when Sri Aurobindo speaks of
Aswapati, he is not speaking of the ordinary horse, not even only of
the life energy. In some sense he is dealing with a different power,
the energy of the entire manifestation.
Death
A second point which has always attracted me comes in the first
book, second section, first mantra. There the rishi says he wants to
connect this manifestation with destruction. Anything that manifests
has to die. There is nothing like a permanent creation. There is a
creation, there is a preservation, there is a destruction. Therefore
how does the destruction start? That is 1.2.1 : ashanaya hi mrtyuhu.
Mrtyuhu death : What is death? Hunger which is death. So the
death we are speaking of is not just a simple matter of the heart
stopping or the kidneys failing. It is our hunger : I want this ... I
want this ... I want this ... I want this ... I want this ... which
never stops. ashanayahe mrtyuhu : the hunger which is Death.
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Kapali Sastriar quotes the famous passage of Taittiriya Upanishad

2.3. He says that we should understand that we always make a
distinction between enjoying the food food in the largest sense, not
only what we eat through the mouth, but whatever we take in through
the ear, eye, everything. attyate iti attihi : Remember you are
eating and also remember that it is eating you The eater eating is
eaten, what Sri Aurobindo mentions in so many places. He calls it
the terrible phrase. So you have to connect the idea of the
manifestation with the idea of destruction.
And this phrase about the eater eaten is not just terrible the
same principle is everywhere. You take for example the 7th mantra in
the first book, 1.7 We recite a mantra to Indra, and we say Indra is
great but the point is that Indra gives the words to chant, Indra
impels the words to come out of your mouth, therefore at the same
time it is Indra who is chanting and Indra who is the chanter. The
idea behind all of these statements is that there is a single principle
that goes on and on here and there and everywhere.
The Worlds
So when we speak of Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse ... normally
when we speak of aswa , the limited idea, there is always the idea of
a vital energy. As you know we are made up of 7 worlds 8 worlds
are sometimes mentioned, but 7 is more common. There is the world
of Matter anna, there is the world of all our vital energies, prana,
there is the lower vital and the upper vital as you know, all our high
ideals and that sort of thing are the upper vital, cravings are the lower
one, all of it comes under the prana, and then there is the Mind.
The Mind as you see is made up of the indriyas, the five senses
which control them, plus the manas, which exudes our actions, plus
the buddhi, the power of judgment What should I do, this or that?
plus everything in which it floats called chitta. This is our Mind. Sri
Aurobindo says, take the animal. The animal when it sees with the
eye, that is the decision-maker. The sense is the decision-maker. But
when we come to the human being, there is a difference. The buddhi
takes a decision, and asks the manas to carry it out. And so we have
anna, prana, mana, these are the three lower principles.
Corresponding to them we have the three higher principles, sat
existence, chit, consciousness-force, and ananda, bliss. Sri Aurobindo
70

always says the foundation of the world is ananda. The Taittiriya

Upanishad says Anandena khalu imani sarvani bhutani jayante.
The whole world comes out of this ananda, anandena jivanti.
To make a loose comparison, when we speak of sat it is something
that has formed everything else. Therefore connect the sat with
Matter, chit with the prana and ananda with the mind. What is the
difference between the top three and the bottom three? The bottom
three are also divine powers, except they have forgotten that they
have come from a divine source. They have forgotten that there is a
unity among them, so they are always fighting. The vital is fighting, I
want this I want this. Mind is saying, No you have a heart problem
dont eat it. The body says, I cant handle your demands. So they
are always fighting. Why does death come? Death comes because
the soul has decided that the body simply cannot handle any more
experiences. The soul says I quit and as a result the death starts, not
the other way round. So that being the case, there is an intermediate
plane, known as the mahas. The Upanishad calls it mahas, The Veda
calls it vignana that is the fourth world. The point is that when the
original manifestation takes place, Sacchidananda, when it comes to
the mahas the unity is intact. It remembers from where it has come,
it is intact. When it comes from there to anna-prana-mana that
unity vanishes. Therefore, when we speak of the recovery of the
Supermind, what are we saying? We want to recover the integral
features, to remember. There is a permanent memory in our
consciousness. Anna-prana-mana comes directly from that. That
internal knowledge is not the ordinary knowledge. It is something
else, Sri Aurobindo calls it the Great Knowledge
Each of these different worlds have their structures, loka is the
world. It is built by a consciousness, and simultaneously it has a
structure of its own, and its own powers which rule it, the gods and
the godheads and all that sort of thing.
Sri Aurobindo wanted a place where he could put down all the
intuitions he had in these seven planes. That is the connection between
the Veda and Savitri.
The whole of the second book of Savitri, Aswapatis book, is
concerned with the description of the world-stair. Not just a simple
description, A is here, B is there , but in some sense, how we ascend
it point number one. Number two, what is the goal of this human
71

life? That is the whole point. For both of them, the World-Stair if you
can imagine, the World-Stair really goes from one peak to another.
What is the earliest reference for that? It is in the Rig Veda, in the
very early part, the First Mandala, 10th Sukta, second mantra. This is
dedicated to Indra.
You know in the Veda Agni especially for a person like Sri
Aurobindo, Agni had a great fascination, because Agni in some
sense represents the secret of all work, the guidance in work.
You see, according to Sri Aurobindo, any work requires three things.
It needs the knowledge of the work, it needs force, energy, and
when we do any work we demand enjoyment. So when you say,
Oh I cant work properly, what is the reason? I dont get the
benefit, therefore somebody else gets the benefit. Or in the
beginning I dont have the proper knowledge, or the force in
between, that is, the will-power. When Agni comes, in it is the
will-power connected with wisdom: krato, kavi-kratu kavi is
the wisdom, krato is the will power. Therefore in some sense
harmonising the three is Agnis business, even though he supplies
primarily the will power, the middle part in some sense. So, Sri
Aurobindos favourite idea in relation to education, where he says
you need a body of knowledge, the shastra, then the guru, and
third you need what is called the utsaha, the enthusiasm, and
fourthly we need what is called Time patience kala, it has its
own dynamics as it were. The utsaha is the one which empowers
your willpower. As a matter of fact one of the popular books in
the West is, you know, we have all heard of the idea of the Art
of War, but there is a flipped idea, the War on Art. This author
says, if you take all the people in this world, how many of them
have started learning music, or learning hatha yoga, how many
have started on this or that : they go to the first class, then drop
off, 99% of all the new projects started off always end up
incomplete. Therefore the universe is as it were having a war on
all art. That is the idea. The idea of Sri Aurobindo is that this
happens because you have not cultivated the Agni power. The
Agni power is always awake even when you are sleeping, it doesnt
leave you alone, it always pushes you, pushes you, pushes you.
Indra is the god of the Divine Mind. So this mantra, this 1.10.2 is
for Indra.
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People think that Vedic Sanskrit is exceedingly simple Sanskrit. You have
to understand, and you should not, repeat not, confuse it with the Sanskrit
of our Kalidasa, Bhasa and company. These are all authors of what is
called Classical Sanskrit. Dont ever confuse them, they are quite different
acts. We also speak of the Dravidian languages, Kannada, Tamil and
everything. People think that they are all different from Sanskrit. They
are different from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa etc. but they are intimately
related to the Sanskrit of the Vedas. This is the reason we speak of a
single origin of all the Indian languages. It is not that all of them are
derived from Sanskrit, but that the same creativity that created the Vedic
Sanskrit was also there at the origin of the Dravidian languages. Sri
Aurobindo gives several different examples. For example, one of the
important words appa. In Tamil it means father, same thing in Kannada
also. Clearly there is no such word in Sanskrit. So does it mean that
Sanskrit and Tamil are quite different languages? Sri Aurobindo says,
No there is always a cognate, apya, which means son someone
close to you. That word is there in the Veda itself.
To understand the Veda mantra, simply split it into four parts. Each
part has three or four words. If you spend a little time you will be
able to understand. Repeat it slowly, once, twice, thrice, get a handle
on it. For example, yat sanoh sanum aruhat. That is the first part.
sano means peak. aruhat means climbing. Our life is climbing
from one peak to another peak.
Fifty years ago when I was a student in India, the lecturer told us,
With this book you are not going to reach the peaks of Physics, you are
going to reach the plateaus from which the peaks are visible. That is the
whole idea. You go to the first small peak as it were, only when you have
reached it you know what more should be done. A person who stays
always at the bottom does not even know. What is the second part?
Bhuri aspasta kartram. You know what is yet to be done. You know
which peak to aim for next you have to continue in music or in
computers. Then what happens? Indra artham chetati The power of
Indra will guide you. Cetam arthati means bring into your consciousness
what should be done. And the fourth point: he doesnt simply give you
the hint. The rishi says he comes with his troops to help you.
Yat sano sanum aruhat bhuri aspasta karvam
Indra artham cetati yuthena vrishnir ejatit.
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He comes with his helping power. He sends the helping power to you.
In the Veda two ideas are always there, right? The idea of climbing,
and the idea of a boat journey. For example 1.99.1, jatavedhase: our
life is like going in a boat naveva sindhum. And then he speaks of
rebirth as an educational tour. Dhirgatamas is a poet in the first Mandala
who is known for exceedingly complex symbolism, whatever he
writes. And he writes in his first Mandala, 140th Sukta, 12th mantra,
that our whole life is not a journey in a single boat, we go in one boat,
we finish the task, then take another boat, and do another task, then
third boat, and so on. These are the voyages of the spirit.
Both these ideas are there in the Veda, climbing the peak, and
voyaging. And remember the voyage image is the one Sri Aurobindo
uses in the fourth canto of Savitri, The Secret Knowledge.
So the point is that the understanding of these seven worlds is in
some sense even more detailed in Savitri. Even the Puranas dont
go into all the details Sri Aurobindo gives in the Second Book, The
Book of the Traveller of the Worlds.
A few words on some of the worlds will be useful for you. For
example, there is a canto called The Paradise of the Life Gods. It is
very interesting because, do you know what the word paradise comes
from? Paradise comes from two words : para + desha . Paradise is
the other world. The Paradise of the Life Gods who are these? In
the Indian tradition, we speak of the gandharvas and apsaras, who
spend all of their time singing and dancing. They were very popular
with Kalidasa for obvious reasons, and it is these people who are in
this paradise of the life gods.
Then later you come to the Heavens of the Ideal. To understand
what these are, you have to go forward to Book Ten, Canto 2, The
Twilight of the Ideal. There it starts. It is in the morning of the gods
thats how the line begins. Then Death says You see, look at all the
bright ideas you people have, look at what happens to them. The
argument which our Mrtyu, our Death doesnt understand is of course
that the new idea is not a repetition of the old idea. It is built on the
strength of the old idea. Therefore we are always having a progression,
up and up and up.
Then of course at the end Aswapati comes to the Kingdoms of
the Greater Knowledge. And there, in some sense, we have an
exposure of the world of Swarga how perfection can be there.
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Sri Aurobindo spends a comparatively small amount of time on

that. Remember how much time he spends on the Little Life and the
little gods and that sort of thing, and the amount of time he spends on
the gods of the Falsehood a really long amount of time. He had to
spend that time because in the Veda there is a repeated reference to
this battle between the gods and the hostiles. Who are these forces
who prevent us from carrying out our higher aims? These are what
we call the hostile forces, who do not want to see people climb up.
They always put some sort of an obstacle on the ladder. Therefore
only when you overcome the obstacle, then a new power comes to
you. The argument is that Agni or Indra does nothing to help you
overcome the obstacle, but once you use the will-power to overcome
the obstacle then you understand, you have learned something and
you get a new power. There is always the idea that the gods are
silent. That is not quite so, the gods are always somehow active; but
in some sense, until you get the hang of how to do this sort of work,
always obstacles are there. So Sri Aurobindo had to spend a lot of
time on these worlds of the Falsehood.
The point he wants to make is, in the classical Vedanta they always
seem to have the idea that good and bad are simply the converse of
each other. No he doesnt say that. Confusion is there, but there
are all the powers of falsehood that are actively engaged in obstructing
progress. You really cannot deal with those guys by human effort
alone. Therefore our prayers go to Indra again, Come and help us,
come and help us!
So the entire reading of the Second Book of Savitri in some way
links you up with the details of the so many different worlds, which
are hinted at in the Veda. Again and again I repeat hinted. The
Veda is not a prose book. You cant say, go here and go there, you
will get answers. No, you have to search. For example, I told you
about the mantras you have to search for them. People ask, Doesnt
the Veda ever mention the idea of a liberation somewhere? Yes, it is
mentioned in the book of the Atris 5.46.1. There it says Whether we
are reborn or whether we want to go away from the manifestation
entirely vimokshanam even then, O Agni, we need your help.
Some want to have complete liberation. They dont want to come
back here. Other people, like us for example, we want to have birth
because each birth is an experience for getting more and more
75

perfection. And thats the only reason why we see a person at the
age of 4 becoming a great musician because he has carried over in
some sense his attainment of perfection in the earlier birth. He stops,
he becomes something else, maybe he becomes a mathematician, or
he becomes a sculptor. So it goes on and on and on. Therefore we
look forward to a new life because we are moving from one perfection
to another perfection.
Fate
Then when you see the Book of Fate, theres a very interesting point.
Always when we speak of Fate in English, people dont know what
it really means. There was a book written in 1851, 150 years ago, by
a man called Pococke. It has now been reprinted fortunately. Now
this is the question, you see. When you go to words in English like
Smith, or Cartwright or Wheelwright, you know exactly what that
word means, Cartwright, he is the guy that fixes the cart, Wheelwright
makes wheels, Smith. But, Pococke says, when you go to Greek,
for example, none of the Greek words ever give a hint as to what
their components are and he says the reason is that you cant find
the components in the Greek language, but if you go to the Sanskrit
roots then we get a little hint how to handle them
So about Fate : as you know, in Sanskrit we dont have the sound
f at all. This sound is absent in Sanskrit. In Kannada and other
languages, what is the translation of Fate? It is The Unseen Path:
adrishtapatha. Patha is the path. Adrishta it is not seen, it is not
clear to us. This P of patha becomes f = Fate. The problem of Fate
is the problem of the path you are going to follow. And that is exactly
the theme of this whole Book. Why do we take a certain path? And,
conversely, why do we not take certain other paths? That is the
problem of Fate. And automatically, obviously, we dont take certain
paths because we are frightened of the pain. Pain is the hammer of
the gods / to beat a dead resistance in the mortal heart as Sri
Aurobindo would say. Therefore the problem of Fate or of the Path
and the problem of Pain are intimately connected.
This problem of the path was one that was very clear to the hearts
of the rishis. For example, as you know, when Hindus are cremated
they recite a mantra. And that mantra is in some sense meant for all
people it can be used also by the living. Agne naya supatha raye
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 O Agni! Carry us along the good path to the wealth, the felicities,
asman viswani deva vayunani vidvan. In the next part, it says, we
have a tendency to do bad things automatically. Juhuranameno.
juhuranam is a tendency, eno is an inharmonious action. Therefore
nama uktim vidhema we repeat these mantras. The idea of all
these mantras to Agni is lead, lead, lead. When we ask ourselves to
be led in ignorance, you set the ground rules: you will be led in
ignorance. But if you appeal to a higher power, depending upon your
surrender the power acts. And surrender is one of the most important
words in the Veda. For example we say namaste namaha te
namaha means surrender. The idea of namaha, of surrender, is the
background of many of the Veda mantras.
The Soul-Powers
And one more point. In the Book of Yoga, you find these three great
madonnas the Goddess of Suffering, the Goddess of .... You should
understand that these have a close connection, not directly with the
Veda, but with Sri Aurobindos insights.
Kailasa most of you will have heard the word. Kailasa is
supposed to be a mountain in the Himalayas where Lord Shiva resides.
But Kailasa as a word has no meaning in Sanskrit. In one of his
notations in the Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo splits it. He sees it as
Ka-i-la-sa. This is the way it is written in Sanskrit. Ka, he says,
stands for Kali, i stands for Ishwari, Maheshwari, la stands for Lakshmi,
and sa stands for Saraswati. Ka i la sa.
In the Veda, first the One is there, that is the power of the Ishwari,
she is the Power of the One, the one who accepts all the people.
Then the Kali force comes in. that is the second Mother, and the
third power is the joint power of Lakshmi and Saraswati. So the Kai-la-sa connotation is there also.
Death again
To understand the last part of Savitri you have to remember that
Sri Aurobindo very carefully avoids the word Yama. In the Veda
Yama is the son of Vivaswan, one of the Solar powers. Therefore
in some sense he is a supramental power Just as Sri Aurobindo
clearly says, we need Agni whatever people may say, he is not an
overmental god, Sri Aurobindo says in his commentary on 1.77.
that in our attempts to go from the Mind to the Supermind we need
77

the assistance of Agni, and thats how he quotes the five Sukta
mantras there.
In the Veda, Yama is the god of death, but not as he is portrayed in
the Puranas. You should not confuse the Vedic gods with their Puranic
namesakes. They are all different in function, they are a different
business and thats all.
When you come to think of Death, who are the people who
have actually handled the problem of Death? Of course Nachiketas
in the Katha Upanishad. He goes there, he asks him, he says Im
not interested in your boons basically he gets the knowledge of
death. And remember Death gives Nachiketas three boons, and
one of the boons is how he can come back to the earth. So the idea
here is that death is not an involuntary journey it is a voluntary
journey. You dont find that idea anywhere else in the Upanishads,
but in the Veda you do, in the Tenth mandala 135th Sukta. And
thanks to the one who has discovered it, that is Kapali Shastriar. It
is in Kapali Sastris book. He has published Texts on the
Upanishads. The question is there, the holy man mentions a vehicle,
a one-pointed vehicle which moves upward, which has no wheels,
which can go back and forth, from there to here and from here to
there. It is a short mantra. Kapali also doesnt give very many
details about it, but he points it out for people who are interested.
Therefore when we are thinking of death we ask the question, not
of people who talk about death but of those who have the power of
returning from death and going back there again. There is a close
connection with what is called in the Indian philosophical tradition the
Jivanmukta a person who can die, but that is a little different concept
which need not detain us here.
The point about Death in Savitri is that he is what we might call a
typal god. That means he has forgotten the origins of the totality. He
is not like Agni and Indra of the Veda. He has forgotten. Each part,
remember, is infinite in itself. Sri Aurobindo always speaks of how
the whole manifestation is combining the infinite vowels with the
finite power of the consonants. That is how manifestation comes.
For example if we take an ordinary word like Ka , k is the consonant,
a is the vowel. The vowel is the powerful thing. Ka + i becomes ki,
etc. This is at the superficial level.
78

The whole point of Sri Aurobindos writing in the last three cantos of
Book Ten is to show that even though he developed the scheme of
the Ideals and that sort of thing, even though they die away, still the
whole problem of the perfected life, and perfected mind and perfected
prana they are very much there, they are always ascending. That is
Savitris restatement of the problem and again and again and again.
To focus only on the destruction there, of course the form has to be
destroyed, but that is not the end of it.
This point comes so many times in the Veda. In the Rig Veda we
have what are called the Five Suktas, they are usually used at birth,
death, in what we call antiyesti. They are nos. 13, 14, 15, 17, 18
This point is again hinted there. Yama is the consoler god in one of
those texts. In the Veda, it is very interesting, Yama in many places is
what we call the Ordainer, the one who controls everything. So thats
how, for example in the first mandala when we speak of Yama, Yama
Matarishwan, basically we use that only as the Ordainer, who
ordains the process of the ending. Not that he is destructive.
And then there is what we may call the power of the Death,
which is really a power of the ignorance, which carries out the actions
depending upon those people who have not reached this level of
consciousness. Thats how the Veda speaks of the distinction between
the devayana and the pitriyana and that sort of thing. It does mention
this point here and again. Ultimately the idea is that for people who
have realised it this idea of immortality is there, but death is no more
than a marker, like a milestone when you come to the 10th mile,
then 20th mile, 30th mile etc. Birth is also no more than a marker. But
when you have not yet come to that stage, then of course it is painful
and everything else, and we go to the pitriloka and that sort of thing.
The Vedas have no place for what is popularly called in India naraka
Hell and that sort of thing. There is simply no mention of this word
naraka. It does mention of course what is called in the Isha
Upanishads, the sunless worlds. Sri Aurobindo mentions that in his
commentary on the Isha Upanishad, asurya loka the sunless
worlds. He does spend some time on that sort of thing. But naraka
is a purely Puranic concept. A person like myself cannot say whether
they exist or not. They are really beyond my comprehension. For
that you have to read the words of the Mother and that sort of thing.
I can only tell you what the Veda has to say.
79

So, summing up what I have been saying about the connection between
the Veda and Savitri, the first thing you have to do is to separate
yourself from the focus of the traditional legend on Chastity. You
may also have heard this story about Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna,
as you know, died of cancer. When he was dying of cancer his wife
Sarada Devi, who was also a remarkable spiritual personality,
performed panchami tapas. Panchami tapas means when you sit
in the middle and you have four fires surrounding you and it is midday, the fifth fire is the sun above. She did tapas like that for a few
days. And suddenly she heard a voice saying In this world, what is a
husband? What is a wife? Then she stopped, and she went back to
Ramakrishna and he said, You did all this, and what did you get?
Nothing. This illustrates the traditional idea that wifely chastity can
protect the husband from death.
Therefore all these different ideas, you can read them in the Veda
here, you can read them in Savitri there. So surely the good Lord
will guide you in all of your endeavours. If these suggestions are of
any help to you, I am happy.

80

News of Savitri Bhavan

May - December 2006
The most striking development at Savitri Bhavan during this period
has been the completion of the first section of the main building of
our complex. This handsome new building was officially inaugurated
on September 29 by Dr. Karan Singh, the Chairman of the Auroville
Foundation.

The new building August 2006

Dr. Karan Singh giving the inaugural speech on September 29, 2006

Construction is now going on, to realise a second, bigger, section.

81

Meditations on Savitri collection

In August we were able to show the fourth film in the new
Meditations on Savitri series, which is being created by Manohar
from new digital photographs of Hutas beautiful paintings. The fourth
film covers the first half of Canto Four of Book One of Savitri, The
Secret Knowledge. On December 4th the fifth film was shown,
covering the second part of the Canto.
Meanwhile Giorgio Molinari, the photographer who prepared those
new photographs, has provided us with very high quality prints in
actual size of the paintings of Books Three to Five. These
reproductions are now on display in the Exhibition Hall. New prints
will be displayed as they become available, to create a permanent
rotating exhibition.
Reading Room
The following new study aids were added to the Reading Room
Collection :
Translations (in alphabetical order of Language)
French

Lafond, Guy, Savitri: une legende et un

symbole, 2005, Montreal Canada, Christian
Feuillette.
Panier, Janine, Sri Aurobindo Savitri, livre
1,2,3,4,5 [Computer print out work in
progress].

German

Steiger, Peter et al, Sawitri: eine sage und

ein Gleichnis. 3rd revised [bi-lingual] ed.,
2005, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Trust.

Italian

Yudi, Savtri: una leggenda e un simbolo,

part 1 (Book 1 & Book Two Cantos 1-9)
[photocopy of a handwritten ms - work in
progress]

Kannada

Domanlal (Dr.C.B. Patil), Sri Aurobindara

Mahakaya Savitri 1998. Bijapur

82

Russian

Melgunov, Dimitri , Savitri, Book One,

Canto One, The Symbol Dawn, 2006,
St.Petersburg, The Translator
Savitri Book Four, Canto One, The Birth
and Childhood of the Flame, 2006, St.
Petersburg, The Translator

Spanish

Kevala, Savitri : Una legenda y un Simbolo:

Primere Parte Libro 1, El libro de los
comienzos; Libro II, El libro del Viagero de
los Mundos, Cantos I al VI, 2005, Barcelona,
Spain, Fundacion Centro Sri Aurobindo

Telugu

Rao, K.V Sri Aurobindo Savitri,

Devarshi Naradudu [Book Six Cantos 1 and
2], 2006, Hyderabad, The Mothers Integral
School

Studies (in alphabetical order of Author)

Deshpande, R.Y,

Narads Arrival at
Puducherry, SAICE

Madra,

2006,

Gupta, Nolini Kanta, On Savitri, 2001, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo

Ashram
Hemsell, Rod,

Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite,

2006, Auroville, The Author

Iyengar, K.R.S.,

Dawn to Greater Dawn: six lectures on

Sri Aurobindos Savitri, [Photocopy of the
original] 1975, Madras, MatriBhavan
Ushadayam Nundi Mahoudayam Varaku
[Telugu translation of the above} by D.
Shathiyavani Ganesh Kumar, 2006,
Rajamundry, The Translator
83

About Savitri Bhavan

We dream of an environment in Auroville
that will breathe the atmosphere of Savitri
that will welcome Savitri lovers from every corner
of the world
that will be an inspiring centre of Savitri studies
that will house all kinds of materials and activities
to enrich our understanding and enjoyment of
Sri Aurobindos revelatory epic
that will be the abode of Savitri, the Truth that
has come from the Sun
We welcome support from everyone who feels that
the vibration of Savitri will help to manifest a better
tomorrow.

HOW TO SUPPORT THE WORK OF SAVITRI BHAVAN

Savitri Bhavan is entirely dependent on donations and financial help
from all well-wishers is most welcome. Please consider in what way you
could help the Dream of Savitri Bhavan to become a reality

To all our donors and well-wishers

Thank you for your support to the work of Savitri Bhavan.
Please note that the Auroville Administration is requesting that from October
1, 2006 onwards all donation cheques or drafts should be made payable to

Auroville Unity Fund (SAIIER)

They may be sent to Savitri Bhavan as usual.

For all correspondence, please contact :

Savitri Bhavan
Auroville 605 101
Tamil Nadu
INDIA
e-mail : [email protected]
www.auroville.org/education/edu_centres/savitribhavan_main.htm

Savitri
is a Mantra
for the transformation
of the world
The Mother