Heaven raced
with Hell
We have the following description in Savitri (p. 11) about Savitri arriving
at the last turn where heaven must race with hell.
As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,
Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths
Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,
From the bright country of her childhood's days
And the blue mountains of her soaring youth
And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love
To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom
In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.
Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.
A many-hued inner flaming dawn has brought to Savitri
the fated day, the moment of golden truth when heaven must race with hell.
She is encountering the last decisive turn in relationship with the dreadful and
the frightening, and her failure would imply the failure of the present
creation, possibly leading to another pralaya
or dissolution. But Savitri has picked up the mantle, the gauntlet, the
sword of conquest, the bow of burning gold, and must win the battle. Yama, the
God of Death with the soul of Satyavan in his possession, is unyielding and
Savitri is presently following him, though somewhat helplessly. She doesn’t
seem to have any likelihood of winning the difficult race. For a while,
however, she withdraws into her inner self, summoning the strength that alone
can reverse the outcome. She enters her House of Meditation and observes the
eternal Yajna being carried out there. With it, everything changes, and changes
in a most decisive way. The prospects of her winning the race have become
assuredly splendid. Savitri has now become, from behind, the Leader of the
March, and everything is in her full control. Such indeed is the efficacy of
the Vedic Sacrifice. And here is a Sacrifice which is being performed by the
Lord and his Spouse themselves, by the Sat-Purusha and the Adya-Shakti, the
omniscient Being and the omnipotent Consciousness-Force. No power can now stop
Savitri. The race is already settled in the glorious Yajna. Let us have an overview
of this Yajna in Savitri’s House of Meditation.
In the course of Savitri’s encounter with Death we have
the following passage (p. 639) which marks a significant development, even a
kind of an advance, in her attempt to win back the soul of deceased Satyavan,
her lover and husband.
Intent upon her silent will she walked
On the dim grass of vague unreal plains,
A floating veil of visions in her front,
A trailing robe of dreams behind her feet.
But now her spirit’s flame of conscient force
Retiring from a sweetness without fruit
Called back her thoughts from speech to sit within
In a deep room in meditation’s house.
For only there could dwell the soul’s firm truth:
Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,
It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth
Where burns for the high house-lord and his mate
The homestead’s sentinel and witness fire
From which the altars of the gods are lit.
Then at once takes a sudden change in the course of
events:
The mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed
And she behind was leader of their march
And they in front were followers of her will.
Along with the witness fire we also witness the power
of Sacrifice, of the Vedic Yajna that is going to give necessary measure and
strength to Savitri in order to meet the dire eventuality, the defeat-loaded
challenge. In it is going to be decided the fate of her mission and with it the
uncertain fate of the evolutionary travail itself upon the earth. But who is
the house-lord and who his mate, they making offerings to the well-kindled
sacrificial fire? What is that fire in which are lit the fires of the cosmic
powers that govern the worldly rounds leading them to the divinity, that in
which they must grow in their expressive splendours of Truth?
We are here at a crucial point in the development of
the legend’s charged narrative and a lot is going to hinge upon the way the
occult battle will be fought, fought in the abysses of space, nay of darkness;
in it will be shaped the course of events. It will be therefore worthwhile to
get an idea about the Yajna in Savitri’s House of Meditation.
In the story of Vyasa as given in the Mahabharata,
Savitri is described as one who was an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānayogaparāyaņā. Just before going to
the forest on the fated day she pays her obeisance to the Rishis and receives
their benedictions. By entering into that Yoga she confirms and fixes their utterance
in the nature of the Truth as a living dynamism in life. The truth that is
there behind this Yoga of Meditation is what is actually revealed to us by Sri
Aurobindo in the present passage. Indeed, it is Savitri’s meditation and we
cannot enter into its magnificence, unique as it is to her alone, unique in its
depth and in its transformative character to fully take care of antagonistic
mortality. However, it should be possible for us to live in its encouraging warmth
and profit from it; in it we can make spiritual progress, to the extent that we
can even transform the physical body into an altar for her sacrificial fire
that shall bring auspicious merits of the Yajna to us.
The Deadlock
Yama as the Dark Terrible has snatched away the soul of
Satyavan and is taking it to the Abode of the Departed located deep in the
South. Savitri follows him determinedly, her mortal pace equalling the god’s, follows
even as she enters into the “perilous silences beyond”. But she is weighed down
by her mortality and is afraid that the two would soon vanish out of her sight.
Then in “a moment of secret body’s sleep” in which the dividing sense of human
frailties and faculties is absent, she does something extraordinary, decisive.
She forgets herself: in a swift occult action she discards all the heavy
sheaths, disburdens herself from what would hold her back to the gross earth.
Savitri then moves out and surrounds Satyavan with her nameless infinity to
give him love’s absolute protection. The three march on in an unusual
procession, Savitri behind Yama and Satyavan in their front. They cross the
“weird country” and reach dangerous regions of Death’s colossal nothingness. He
the Terrible declares to her:
This is my silent dark immensity,
This is the home of everlasting Night.
Savitri survives the Assault. Not only that. Like an
undaunted warrior unmindful of the hazards of the battle, yet as if certain of
her victory, she steps into the very camp of the harsh Adversary. She is in a
place where dwells for ever only the endless Night. Yama looks at her with a
stern and terrifying gaze and forbids her to accompany them any farther; for,
there even Time must die. Savitri listens not and tells him that she is not a mere
creature of mortality, a lump of helpless matter, but is strength more than
matching his, that which cannot be subdued. It is in that strength she wants
back
Into earth’s flowering spaces Satyavan.
Death refuses. Instead he proclaims himself to be
the sole and supreme creator who brought the universe out of this immense dark
void with all the darksome possibilities latent in it. Savitri cannot trespass
into his kingdom and violate the ordained laws; rather she must return to the
ways of the transient world and cling to the brief joys by which the little
creature spends his little days, hoping in the long travail of life nothing
else. After all, the love for which she is asking Satyavan back is only a queer
passion, a fancy’s fleeting fondness,—if not a figure of meaningless falsehood.
Later, he would even grant her two boons: for Satyavan’s blind and exiled father
Dyumatsena kingdom and power and friends, and his lost eyesight. He would get
back his lost greatness and royal trappings so that he could live into peaceful
age; by the second, he would recover the sensuous solace of light to eyes which
could have found a larger realm, a deeper vision in their fathomless night. He tells
Savitri to return; she must go back to the mortal world in the safety that is
possible there. But she refuses, and asserts that she is his equal and that her
birth was a special birth in which were conscient several suns. She further
adds that the task in which she is engaged is actually the task in which the
battling gods labour, and its fulfilment lies only in Satyavan’s return with
her to the earth. But Death is least concerned about it. Rather he considers
that it is Savitri’s fond hallucination that things here can be changed. From
age to wearisome age Avatar after Avatar has come, but the world has remained
ever the same,—an inert, inconscient, ignorant mass of crudeness, always
afflicted by misery and unhappiness and want. He tells Savitri that she is a
helpless priestess in imagination’s temple and must throw away notions of
changing the fixed laws of the universe. He even chides at her. After all, she
is asked, what is love? In the same breath, she is informed that it is
something that has suddenly awoken in her because of Satyavan’s death—as if it
never existed prior to it; death was the cause of its appearance and she must
respect it. And what kind of love is this? Again, she is told that this is a
love which does not last too long. It would soon fade away and die when she would
soon find the company of other happier and stronger men. Love, according to
Death, is nothing but a habit of flesh in the darkness of the material
circumstance. It is an illusion to think that life and love have place in this material
world, a world which is full of mortality; it is a world governed by the iron law
of gravitating heaviness. It is by the potency and power of this law that everything
proceeds helplessly towards extreme fragmentation, towards ultimate dissolution.
Finally, what Savitri calls God’s creation that itself disappears. Death has
built up the metaphysics of this existence. But Savitri is Savitri and she is
going to dismiss it. It is her turn to demolish it.
The kind of spell Death tried to cast over Savitri does
not touch her. She is one on whom no shadow can be cast; she would not fall
into the trap. She is alert and breaks the “dangerous music”; in the sweetness
and harmony of her words there is promise and hope and certitude. She is a
little crescent in the sky of night cutting the gloom with the edge of her
smile; she is a cozy warm cradle holding in it the child of godly felicity. She
forbids Death slaying her soul and she asserts her right to love in the green
and happy groves of the earth. she maintains: (pp. 612-13)
My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to from God, to God returns.
Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.
Savitri’s love and joy, through an intensification in
the person of Satyavan, become wide, universal. There is as if a mission also
that bids her to love. Through its transforming alchemy it is there to save the
world from all suffering,—and that is its purpose. Not corporeality, but a
bright spiritual yearning burns in her heart; it, like a flame, leaps to clasp
in its folds the roseate body of her eternal lover. Indeed, the Satyavan she is
claiming is not an ordinary mortal. He is the immortal in the world of death.
Since the beginning of this earthly creation they have been together, man and
woman from the first, the twin souls born from one undying fire. She who came
wearing a human form that love might grow here in happy felicitous fulfilment
is none other than the force of God; it is she who guards the seal against the
rending hands of death, it is she who makes sure that love does not cease to
live upon the earth. When Savitri first met Satyavan in the Shalwa Woods she
without a moment’s pause recognised him to be none but the God of Love behind
Death; she knew immediately that he was awaiting Love’s victory that a greater
age be ushered in and the world opened up to the infinity of happiness and joy.
Death, who covered up Love, had to be encountered and the falsity of that
presence dissolved.
But the actualities of the world, according to Death,
go to show that it is as though this frail lady is living in a shimmering
fancy’s rainbow-land, in a sky of make-believe gathered from the vaporous
musings of her passion-filled heart. It seems that even in that land or in that
sky the clouds, heavy with humidity, intercept the sunlight of what she
imagines to be true. The question of questions is: how can one think of
building heaven on earth when the elemental characters of the two are sharply
opposed to each other, when there is a fundamental incompatibility between the
two? Granting for a moment that she can dream of it, it shall prove to be a
dream bearing the stamp of her physical mind which is nothing but a product of
the working of dull and brutish Matter in the inconscient creation. So,
finally, all becomes a play in the hands of Death, a universe for his own
manifestation. Hidden behind this vast universe the only one single all-pervasive
god, holding on its solid shoulders is the creative Void from which Matter
itself was born. “All upon Matter stands as on a rock.” Remove that rock, knock
off that base of the Void and the entire superstructure shall fall like a house
of cards. Without respecting Matter, without knowing its laws, its modes of
functioning and the nature of its deep reality, without recognising the
foundational aspects which sustain this massive machinery, how can Savitri hope
love to abide and flower upon earth? how can it be? Truly, the dichotomy
between Matter and Spirit is so extreme and so axiomatic that to think they can
coexist will only mean that one is living in an illusory moonshine. It is vain
to conceive a spiritual world emerging from the womb of inconscient Matter.
What Savitri is doing, Death tells in a loud assertive voice, is simply sending
imagination’s birds in the sky, eagles in a high flight towards the sun; hers
are words that have wings dyed in the red splendour of her heart, but it is
unfortunate that they lack the essential substantiality of knowledge of things
in their reality. Savitri’s love cannot abide in the mud-house of Matter. And
how was Matter formed after all? Was it not his creation for his own
habitation? Was it not Death who himself had pressed the ether of the Void into
Space? (p. 617)
A huge expanding and contracting breath
Harboured the fires of the universe:
I struck out the supreme original spark
And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,
Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,
Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;
I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,
And built from chemic plasm the living man.
Savitri better understand the principle of this world
and not chase will-o’-wisp. She must lend herself to see and recognise the laws
of nature operating here, she must respect in the tight earthly framework nature
of things as they exist. There is actually no room for God in this brute
immensity. It is by the process of Death’s Sankhya that the inconscient world
arose and it is in that sense that the world is fulfilling itself.
But the living soul of Savitri cannot be slayed by the
scornful and ironic words of Death. His grim philosophy of crookedness calling
Truth to defend Falsehood is itself a smoke-screen; it is keeping hidden behind
it the face of the Sun of Reality. She counter-argues extensively and tells him
in no uncertain words that the All-Creator, making room for himself in his own
Nothingness, in fact by the supreme sacrifice of his royalty, got going to
recreate out of the eternal Night his own embodied infinities as aspects of a
new luminous manifestation in ever-growing dimensions of his truth-conscient
delight; he made the Night another starting-point for yet another kind of
creative joy. What Death sees at the moment is only a half-finished world, a
child yet to attain adulthood of divinity. As yet Death does not realise that
he himself is a part of that wonderful creative delight’s process by which the
miracle of creation arising out of the utter Void is being worked out. (pp.
623-24)
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon.
A glory is his dream of purple sky,
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp,
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
There is the invisible Hand working skillfully and unfailingly,
doing quietly all that needs be done and accomplishing everything that it has
set itself to accomplish. That Hand shall remove the mask and the screen, and
shall reveal the glorious shape of the Truth-Beauty that ever resides here. By
it Yama the resplendent shall be revealed to us in his proper figure of
greatness and glory. To draw from eternal Loss the plenitude of eternal Gain,
the gain of abounding Joy, and multiply it immeasurably is a supreme act, and
only some confident supreme omnipotence can conceive of it and dare to do it.
God’s plunge in the Night was with the marvellous intent of lifting up every
bit breathing of him, lifting it up to the worlds of graceful and dazzling
happiness over which shines the Sun of Truth. He had the glory of Being; he
shall have the glory of adventurous Becoming. Because of this plunge, evolution
out of inconscience has become possible. But this inconscience itself is
occultly creative and as a contributive aspect of that evolution Death has
become a means of growth. Though apparently he is a power of negation denying
the prospect of godly manifestation here, he seems to serve a secret purpose in
totality of the unfolding operation. In it all that is unworthy of
transformation shall get dissolved into the Void, pragmatically waiting there
perhaps for another occasion to bring out yet hidden and finer aspects in the
scheme of things. This also implies that presently Savitri is not going to
conquer Death the Immortal in the usual sense that, he will be dissolved;
rather she will transform him by removing the veil of inconscience that he has put
around him as a part of the functioning. Consequently, what shall emerge will be
in the bright person of love, beauty, power, knowledge, as the self of bliss
itself. Indeed, in this entire sequence Death himself becomes the frontal
aspect of the Supreme in the Inconscient; when the veil gets removed we meet
him in the positive countenance in this paradoxical unfolding. Death is a mode
of manifestation. Plutus, the god of wealth mentioned by Phaedrus, is a
divinity who brings forth riches from the soil; Death or Yama as the son of
Vivasvan pours radiances to illumine the mysteries of the Night. Savitri knows
this mystery of Death’s birth; he doesn’t know it because he has chosen himself
to go behind the thick veil of Inconscience. Because he has put on this veil,
naturally it also becomes difficult to remove it. That is the great challenge
Savitri has to meet.
Savitri asserts that it is in the heart of the Ether of
Delight, ānandākāsh, that God’s
creation breathes and lives and grows. She sings the Anthem of Felicity. If
this Felicity were not there nothing would come into existence, and should it withdraw
all will just collapse; it is the honey’s sweetness which causes the birth of
the gods, and it is that which fosters them, and gives them increasing riches;
in the overflooding of that miraculous ecstasy, life and mind and body draw
their nourishment; in that enjoyment they widen and enlarge in deathlessness.
That is why the Rishis raise to the Lord of Delight and Immortality, Soma, hymn
after cheerful hymn: “O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food,
thou art the vast, the divine home; wearing heaven as a robe thou encompassest
the march of the sacrifice. King with the sieve of thy purifying for thy
chariot thou ascendest to the plenitude; with thy thousand burning brilliances
thou conquerest the vast knowledge.” Or, on another occasion: “Placed in
delight he flows to the pleasant Names in which he increases; vast and wise he
ascends the chariot of the vast sun, the chariot of a universal movement.”
Savitri herself, in the lyrical sweetness of an enchantment, tells Death: (p.
630)
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.
A mute Delight regards Time’s countless works;
To house God’s joy in things Space gave wide room,
To house God’s joy in self our souls were born.
This universe an old enchantment guards;
Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight
Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink:
The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,
He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house;
He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs:
His fires grandeur burn in the great sun,
He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;
He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound;
He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;
He is silence watching in the stars at night;
He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,
Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and
tree.
Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance,
On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth,
In spite of death and evil circumstance
A will to live persists, a joy to be.
Death remains unconvinced. He tells Savitri that it is
good to imagine things that way but they are really not so. Not only imagining,
Savitri is cheating herself by hiring the impudent bright thought-mind which is
clever to supply reason to life’s passion. The harsh fact is that Truth in this
world is “bare like stone and hard like death,” which first she must accept.
Moving on a more metaphysical level, Death tries to explain to Savitri that the
laws of Nature are immutable and that there is no agency which can alter them.
None has succeeded, and Savitri should not attempt the futile. Restoration of
Satyavan’s life is against the laws of established creation, and he cannot
return now to earth. Instead, Savitri can have, by Death’s boon, what once
living Satyavan desired for her that she may surround herself with worldly
happiness. (p. 637)
Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns,
Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,
Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed
Of union with thy husband dear and true.
The terrible debate continues, as if with the ruthlessness
of arch-enemies. But it is not just a debate, a formidable wordy confrontation.
Each utterance flings into the occult depths its assertive will. There is
opposition of force against force, and the fierce battle becomes fiercer as the
core issue is approached. If there is a fundamental antagonism between Spirit
and Matter, if there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two, then it is
inconceivable, in fact imaginary, bizarre that attempt should be made to
reconcile them. That is Death’s postulate and he presses his argument forward
almost with the thrust of violence: (p. 635)
Where Matter is all, the Spirit is a dream:
If all were the Spirit, Matter is a lie,
And who was the liar who forged the universe?
The Real with the unreal cannot mate.
He who would turn to God, must leave the world;
He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;
He who has met the Self, renounces self…
Two only are the doors of man’s escape,
Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace.
Death of his soul his last felicity.
The horror of the soul passing through the door of death
in order to get felicity is for Savitri no less terrifying than that of
crossing the gate of peace by killing the body. In fact, logically speaking,
this negative aspect cannot make Spirit and Matter self-exclusive; if they
cannot be directly reconciled, it does not mean that they can cancel each other
negatively. Spirit or Matter—that is an erroneous starting-point. True, in the
evolutionary process what is predominantly seen is the latter; but the former
is the substratum and the crown of the entire unfoldment, the essence of
things. Matter evolved in Spirit gives to it substantiality which otherwise it
lacks in the earthly manifestation at present. Spirit densified in the form of
Matter brings to physicality God-splendour and God-might. The Ether of infinite
Ecstasy acquires a luminous fixity that is at once supple and many-forming in
its embodiment of the great Truth-consciousness. It is in the triumph of Love
over Death that this divine miracle shall be accomplished. Savitri in her
revelation reaches a
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;
All shall be seized, transcended; there shall kiss
Casting their veils before the marriage fire
The eternal bridegroom and eternal bride.
The heavens accept our broken flights at last.
On our life’s prow that breaks the waves of Time
No signal light of hope has gathered in vain.
In that revelation,—that the suns burn in the fire of
the soul of Savitri,—Death shudders helplessly; but even in that shuddering
there is a secret ecstasy which seems to be quite acceptable to him. The
twilight through which they were moving also trembles, perhaps again in that
shuddering: this trembling was as if to break its own magic’s haunting spell. But
the real issue has yet remained unaddressed. Savitri’s sole concern is to bring
back the soul of Satyavan, and Death continues to be what he was, unyielding,
adamant, relentless, antagonistic. Savitri is facing a road-block and she must
remove it if she is to succeed in her mission. She realizes that by entering
into her House of Meditation she might get the needed help, needed direction. There
she finds the eternal Yajna being performed by the Lord of the Creation
accompanied by his golden Spouse, Yajna by which alone can a new manifestation
take place.