Apropos of the current discussion and a number
of posts related with Evil Persona, let me give here the revised text of an
article that had appeared on 4 May 2009 on the Savitri web-page. It looks into a passage from The Symbol Dawn wherein incarnate
Savitri is making her own personal calamity—the death of her lover and husband
one year after their marriage—an occasion to deal with the great cosmic dread,
the evil seated at the base of things. It is not a personal “evil persona”, if
one may put it that way, that is accompanying her, but it is the global
universal “evil persona” which she is confronting. There is nothing evil in her,
and even her mortality is an aspect of the divine power of manifestation. She
has assumed it for a certain purpose and it should not mean that she is that:
hers is a “mortal birth” for accomplishing an immortal task in fulfilment of
the great Will. There is no Shadow with her, clinging to her wherever she would
go; but she has entered into the Shadow of the Creation, that thus alone it be
dissolved. “Assailing in front, oppressing from above, a concrete mass of
conscious power, he bore the tyranny of her divine desire. He turned to the
Inconscient for support, from which he was born, his vast sustaining self. But
it drew him back towards boundless vacancy as if by himself to swallow up
himself. Finally his body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.” (Savitri, p. 667) That was Savitri’s
conquest of the Shadow, Death. One would say that there is no Evil Persona
attached to the Avatar.
Let us look into the following lines from the opening
canto of Savitri: (pp. 8-10)
A dark foreknowledge separated her
From all of whom she was the star and
stay...
Unknown her act, unknown the doom she
faced...
Even in this moment of her soul’s
despair,
In its grim rendezvous with death and
fear,
No cry broke from her lips, no call for
aid;
She told the secret of her woe to none:
Calm was her face and courage kept her
mute...
Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
Aloof, she carried in herself the world:
Her dread was one with the great cosmic
dread,
Her strength was founded on the cosmic
mights;
The universal Mother's love was
hers.
Against the evil at life's afflicted
roots,
Her own calamity its private sign,
Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant
sword...
Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike
moved,
And sighing she laid her hand upon her
bosom
And recognized the close and lingering
ache,
Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its
place,
But knew not why it was there nor whence
it came...
All came back to her: Earth and Love and
Doom,
The ancient disputants, encircled her
Like giant figures wrestling in the night:
The godheads from the dim Inconscient
born
Awoke to struggle and the pang divine,
And in the shadow of her flaming heart,
At the sombre centre of the dire debate,
A guardian of the uncosoled abyss
Inheriting the long agony of the globe,
A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain
Stared into space with fixed regardless
eyes
That saw grief’s timeless depths but not
its goal...
Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging
scene
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.
A Sanskrit prayer invokes good auspicious things to
all, sarvéşām bhadram astu vah. In fact, this is the benediction Narad
utters just before taking the leave of the royal hosts in Madra. He had come
all the way from his blissful home in
The Mother’s supplication to the divine Master is: “May
all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination!” That illumination will
remove all that is Shadow’s; that will remove the Shadow itself.
The roots of life are afflicted by evil and the question that always haunts us
is, how does God permit evil, if God is all-good, summum bonum? how?
Does he give rise to evil, summum malum? can a perfect creator cause
imperfection in his creation? can in the divine’s world arise the undivine? But
the undeniable fact is, in this phenomenality we do see good and evil,
perfection and imperfection, divine and undivine, see under life’s terrestrial
condition, under its duress and not in the freedom of the spirit. It is human
reason that gets baffled at the dichotomy appearing in front of it, not only as
evil and good, but also as truth and falsehood, ignorance and knowledge,
pleasure and pain, light and shade, life and death; everywhere those baffling opposites
are present.
“Is this your God who created pain, evil, falsehood, error, sin, the whole
dark-skinned brood?”—effectively asks Savitri’s disturbed mother
For Plato the question of good and evil was positional,
arising out of our ignorance of things. Spinoza does not find any real
difference between good and evil; he took a relativist’s position and thought
good and evil as subjective experiences of the individual, and that there is
complete identity of spirit and nature. According to him, there are three kinds
of evil: physical, moral, and metaphysical. In the last, limitation is the
cause of evil.
Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and
physical evil to the action of created free-will. Man alone has brought for
himself the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the Law of God on
obedience to which his happiness depended. Evil is in created things under the
aspect of mutability, and possibility of defect, not as existing per se: and
the errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being,
have been the cause of moral and physical evil. Adam in the Garden of Eden used
his free-will, due to excessive love for Eve as
If existence is fundamentally evil, then the only way to overcome it is by
abandoning it altogether, by Nirvana, by going into the impersonal state. Such
a view could lead us to the extreme philosophy of pessimism. Greek thinkers,
however, considered distrust and doubt could be overcome by wise and virtuous
conduct; they were positivists. For Plato, God was blameless (anaítios)
and the cause of evil rested with the imperfection of the material existence.
Therefore a way has to be found to remove the imperfection at the base of this
material existence. Therein should lie the solution.
But if evil is due to two deeply rooted opposing hostile principles, as we have
in several religions, for instance in Zarathustran Ormuzd and Ahriman, independent
of each other, then the talk of the possibility of a better world will be
meaningless. The extreme position will then lead to the evil as inherent in
Matter, with good in God, making Matter and Spirit irreconcilable. That would
also make such a God unavailing as far as the problem of Matter is concerned.
The dichotomy will be permanent.
In the presence of lasting evil the retributive justice of religion becomes
anathematic to reason. The sin of mankind arising out of his free-will passes
on the buck to it.
I contrast to such dualistic formulations, monism views evil merely as an
interaction of human agency with nature, making nature as the begetter of evil.
Haeckel’s extreme materialism in which substance or matter is the basis of all
things has no place for any other cause for the appearance of evil. In the
theory of pragmatism the world is what we make—we make evil. Going beyond good
and evil, Nietzsche-like, the future man will get endowed with the
will-to-power, making him the master of everything. When such a man,
Nietzsche’s superman with titanic power arrives, there will be no evil.
But the occult truth of the presence of evil is beyond
mental formulations. It is present at Life’s afflicted roots, the black seeds
in the dark soil. This is what the Yogi-Poet sees and tells, sees and tells
because he has experienced it so. Let us read The Life Divine:
p. 606
It is as an outcome of the Inconscience that we can
best watch and understand the origin of falsehood, error, wrong and evil, for
it is in the return of Inconscience towards Consciousness that they can be seen
taking their formation and it is there that they seem to be normal and even
inevitable.
The first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter, and in Matter it would seem
that falsehood and evil cannot exist…
pp. 607-08
The duality begins with conscious life and emerges
fully with the development of mind in life; the vital mind, the mind of desire
and sensation, is the creator of the sense of evil and of the fact of evil.
Moreover, in animal life, the fact of evil is there, the evil of suffering and
the sense of suffering, the evil of violence and cruelty and strife and
deception, but the sense of moral evil is absent; in animal life there is no
duality of sin or virtue, all action is neutral and permissible for the
preservation of life and its maintenance and for the satisfaction of the
life-instincts. The sensational values of good and evil are inherent in the
form of pain and pleasure, vital satisfaction and vital frustration, but the
mental idea, the moral response of the mind to these values are a creation of
the human being. It does not follow, as might be hastily inferred, that they
are unrealities, mental constructions only, and that the only true way to
receive the activities of Nature is either a neutral indifference or an equal
acceptance or, intellectually, an admission of all that she may do as a divine
or a natural law in which everything is impartially admissible. That is indeed
one side of the truth: there is an infra-rational truth of Life and Matter
which is impartial and neutral and admits all things as facts of Nature and
serviceable for the creation, preservation or destruction of life, three
necessary movements of the universal Energy which are all connectedly indispensable
and, each in its own place, of equal value. There is too a truth of the
detached reason which can look on all that is thus admitted by Nature as
serviceable to her processes in life and matter and observe everything that is
with an unmoved neutral impartiality and acceptance; this is a philosophic and
scientific reason that witnesses and seeks to understand but considers it
futile to judge the activities of the cosmic Energy. There is too a
supra-rational truth formulating itself in spiritual experience which can
observe the play of universal possibility, accept all impartially as the true
and natural features and consequences of a world of ignorance and inconscience
or admit all with calm and compassion as a part of the divine working, but,
while it awaits the awakening of a higher consciousness and knowledge as the
sole escape from what presents itself as evil, is ready with help and
intervention where that is truly helpful and possible. But, nonetheless, there
is also this other middle truth of consciousness which awakens us to the values
of good and evil and the appreciation of their necessity and importance; this
awakening, whatever may be the sanction or the validity of its particular
judgments, is one of the indispensable steps in the process
of evolutionary Nature.
pp. 623-24
…a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is
the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born
of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the
source of evil. But it is evident that their relative existence is only a
phenomenon thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary
self-expression, and it is there that we have to look for the significance of
the phenomenon. For the emergence of the life-ego is, as we have seen, a
machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his
self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient,
for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the
Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary
consequence. The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a
translation of the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a
subjective substitute for the true self in our surface experience: it is
separated by ignorance from other-self and from the inner Divinity, but it is
still pushed secretly towards an evolutionary unification in diversity; it has
behind itself, though finite, the impulse to the infinite. But this in the
terms of an ignorant consciousness translates itself into the will to expand,
to be a boundless finite, to take everything it can into itself, to enter into
everything and possess it, even to be possessed if by that it can feel itself satisfied
and growing in or through others or can take into itself by subjection the
being and power of others or get thereby a help or an impulse for its
life-affirmation, its life-delight, its enrichment of its mental, vital or
physical existence.
In this context we might as well read a few relevant
passages from Savitri:
Aswapati in his explorations of this vast universe,
teeming with countless worlds, has entered into the domain of the inconscient
Night, something he could do in the strength of his soul and his spirit:
He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain
And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;
The evil guarded at the roots of life
Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.
On a dim bank where dies subjective Space,
From a stark ridge overlooking all that is,
A tenebrous awakened Nescience,
Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form,
Stared at the inventions of the living Void
And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.
(p. 202)
Where lies the cause of all this suffering, our
suffering? What are the disturbing unsettling powers who cause havoc here?
Which is the blind and dark womb, andhah yoni, from which come these ghastly-grisly
creatures without heart and without soul?
As from a womb obscure he saw emerge
The body and visage of a dark Unseen
Hidden behind the fair outsides of life.
Its dangerous commerce is our suffering's cause.
Its breath is a subtle poison in men's hearts;
All evil starts from that ambiguous face.
A peril haunted now the common air;
The world grew full of menacing Energies,
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
In field and house, in street and camp and mart
He met the prowl and stealthy come and go
Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.
(p. 205)
Life has lost the sense of shame, and has no reservations
to do ugly uncouth things:
There Life displayed to the spectator soul
The shadow depths of her strange miracle.
A strong and fallen goddess without hope,
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.
(p. 212)
“Is this your God who created this painful world?” asks
His will must be worked out in human breasts
Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,
Against the world's Ignorance and its obstinate
strength,
Against the stumblings of man's pervert will,
Against the deep folly of his human mind,
Against the blind reluctance of his heart.
The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free.
(p. 444)
How will this freedom come to man? There are divine
powers working in the earth-conditions and more often than not, their work is
foiled by the antagonist agents in the nether cosmic depths:
But the great obstinate world resists my Word,
And the crookedness and evil in man's heart
Is stronger than Reason, profounder than the Pit,
And the malignancy of hostile Powers
Puts craftily back the clock of destiny
And mightier seems than the eternal Will.
The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot,
The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.
(p. 510)
Only when the four powers of the Divine
Mother—Wisdom-Strength-Harmony-Perfection—have been established in their
fullness in the earth-nature can the higher appear, and work unhindered to
bring about a radical transformation. Then shall there be no more evil that at
present afflicts the roots of life, the greatest evil being death, the evil
standing across the path of the divine Event. Savitri’s work is connected with
the removal of that Evil. Her work is concerned with clearing the way for the
higher powers of the Divine Mother to enter into this manifestation. There is
the huge foreboding Mind of Night standing across the path of the divine Event
and it is that she has to dislodge. The Evil Persona of the World has to
disappear before those higher powers come here and bring glory of the
transcendental realities to this creation. that indeed is the greatness of
Savitri’s work; that is the greatness of Savitri.
http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/11/22/4377784.html
http://www.savitrithelightofthesupreme.org/blog/_archives/2009/5/4/4173176.html