Readings in Savitri Volume 6
Readings in Savitri, Volume 6
Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol spans more than 900 pages and covers the gamut of human life and aspiration, the meaning of existence and the evolutionary development of consciousness. M.P. Pandit has systematically gone verse by verse through this epic and highlighted the sense and opened the meaning to us with his brief commentary or meditation on the themes thus revealed. Sri Pandit was secretary to the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He wrote and lectured extensively on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and the Mother’s transformational work.
In the Readings in Savitri Volume 6, M.P. Pandit systematically reviews Book II, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Cantos 7-15 of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol:
Book II. The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds:
- Canto 7. The Descent Into Night
- Canto 8. The World of Falsehood, The Mother of Evil and The Sons of Darkness
- Canto 9. The Paradise of The Life-Gods
- Canto 10. The Kingdoms and Godheads of The Little Mind
- Canto 11. The Kingdoms and Godheads of The Greater Mind
- Canto 12. The Heavens of The Ideal
- Canto 13. In The Self of Mind
- Canto 14. The World-Soul
- Canto 15. The Kingdoms of The Greater Knowledge
Book Details
Author: M.P. Pandit
Print Length: 304 pages
Publisher: Lotus Press
Sold by: Amazon.com
Book format: Kindle
Language: English
Price: $7.95
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Readings in Savitri Volume 6
THE DESCENT INTO NIGHT
TOWARDS THE WORLD-FAILURE’S CAUSE
A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,
A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,
The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,
He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.
Aswapathy wants to find out the cause of this large-scale failure of the world to become what it was intended to be. He is properly equipped for that task: his mind is not enmeshed in the whorl of life. It is above it and free from its vitiating desire-movements and calm enough to perceive, unmixed and undistracted, the truth of things. Similarly his heart is not overcome by the blind sufferings of life, the badge of the ruling ignorance; it is detached from these obscurations and it is also free and reacts to the truth without deviation.
GAZE INTO THE VIEWLESS VAST
Away he looked from Nature’s visible face
And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,
The formidable unknown Infinity,
Asleep behind the endless coil of things,
That carries the universe in its timeless breadths
And the ripples of its being are our lives.
Those parts of Nature visible to the normal eye do not hold the truths of her workings; in fact her surface movements veil the truths. Aswapathy, in his will to know the truth, shifts his gaze from the misleading surface and plunges it into the vaster indefinite Infinity that opens behind the front of the finite. It is the great unknown beyond the known, the latent upholding the patent, the unmanifest projecting the manifest. What is in movement as the universe is upheld by this vast stable Being. All movements that constitute our lives in the universe are but some pretty currents of that Immensity of Existence.
WORLDS BUILT BY ITS BREATH
The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath
And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,
Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.
This vast Unknown is the real source of our universe. The latter is a product of its spontaneous vibratory stir. Matter and Mind which pose to be self-existent realities in the universe are in fact forms or formulations of this Infinity. What we take to be our own conscious thinkings are really a result of its formative movements.
FOUNT OF PAIN
The veil was rent that covers Nature’s depths:
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.
The penetrating gaze of Aswapathy cuts through the veil of external Nature and reaches into the hidden depths. There he sees the origin of the Pain that afflicts the world, the dark source of the Ignorance that covers all, the poisonous growth of Evil that attacks Life at her very roots.
NESCIENCE STARES
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.
On a border where even subjective extension fails, Aswapathy becomes aware of a dark Nescience which comes to life as it were and stares at all that has come into being and assumed form in the unrolling of Time and at the depths of being from which all has arisen. The insentient Void regards the living Void — even the living appears to be but a void as nothing lasts, all dissolves.