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Book Seven Canto III: The Entry into the Inner
Countries |
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By
an inward movement, Savitri enters into a hushed stillness away from the busy
hum of the mind. All is blank. She seeks her way farther and hears a Voice:
"Thou seekest for man, not for thyself alone. Unless
God assumes humanity he cannot save man. Thou
must accept man's darkness to bring Light to him, his sorrow to bring Bliss to
him. For that purpose, find first thy heaven-born soul in thy material
body." Savitri surges out of the physical body, stands a little outside
of it, looks into the depths of her subtle being and there in its heart
divines her secret soul. She
knocks and presses against the door that guards the inner life; there is a
loud cry from within asking her to go back to earth lest she be tortured and
put to death. A
dreadful movement rises up. The guardian Serpent at the threshold rises
hissing, hounds of darkness growl, strange little beings of varied shapes
scowl and stare, wild animal roarings fill the air with terror. All
around is menace. Still, unshaken, she presses on the bars of the gate and
the gate opens with a protesting jar. The opposing Powers withdraw. She
enters the inner worlds. Through
the portals of the subconscient that is suffocating, she enters the region of
subtle Matter and forces her way through the body to the soul. At
first it is all chaos; life is struggling to emerge from Matter into some
incipient mind. Nothing is formed, all is drifting, uncertain. After a while,
during which she walks in the corridors of inner Time, she breaks out into a
realm of forms, of the beginnings of finiteness, of the world of the senses;
but the soul is not there. All is the clamour of life. Voices, visions,
movements abound, but without any directing will. Life's
power attempts to pull down reason from its seat so that it could reign
unfettered in its sense world. Savitri
pushes away this threatened state and goes on through this dark dangerous
passage fixing her thought on the saviour Name. Then comes a deliverance. All
grows still, empty. She moves through a blank tranquillity — a vacuum of
nameless peace. Slowly
another danger arises on the horizon. A giant head of Life with an
uncontrolled Force looms ahead. Like a turbulent sea it breaks into the
stillness of her self and floods her being with its lust for power, its cry
of hunger. Drunk from the well of the world libido, it seeks for the
primitive joy of Nature. It dreams of the glory of the life gods and cycles
of Desire rise in this infinity. This ardour of Life is not blunted by the
weight of the earth and as this Force of Life rises upwards, there is the
glow of the mind of Life, the vital mind imitating the light of intuition and
its infallibility. But it is a borrowed light mingled with falsehood and
error. In
these nether realms of Life all kinds of contraries are mixed up. Truth and
error, Wisdom and Ignorance, Death and Life are all mingled in this valley of
fleeting Gleams. Souls trapped in this region become agents of Life's
desires, not their masters. Some,
however, warily pass across and reach a greater life. All
this streams past Savitri's vision; the storm and the roar subside and she
breathes once again a free and tranquil air. She
journeys on and steps into a brilliant, ordered Space where Life is tamed and
under control, her will and fancy curbed. Mind and sense govern the
Life-Force. Reason dominates with its rule of symmetry. The
soul is enthroned on a bench of law. Wisdom
is reduced to formula. The ample sweep of Idea is cut into a system and fixed
to pillars of thought or clamped to the ground of Matter. The soul is lost in
its heights. Thought revels in its abstractions. Life's
empire is forced into a scheme of Reason; its course is confined to a safe
level path. It no more dares to adventure, to soar too high or set the world
afire. Under
this dispensation of Reason, thought cannot fly too high or vast;
life-movements are severely cabined; they are directed by a careful reason or
some calm will towards some chosen objective. Life-activity is not a
spontaneous projection of the inner being. The
soul is walled in by limited ideas. Meditation, worship, religion — all of
these are narrowed and mentalised. Ethics is brought in to rule life and
Knowledge covered over by creed. There
comes the country of the Thought-Mind, where there is an air of final
stability. There she is greeted by a being of imposing self-importance who
welcomes her to that land of thought's finality and urges her to rest there
where alone she can find the perfection and certainty she is seeking for. But
Savitri perceives that all there is only a limiting, orderly reign of the
intellect and declines to stay in that realm of apparent Knowledge. She must
proceed to find her soul. Some
are astonished to hear such questions; some scoff at her talk of 'soul' which
they consider to be but a small gland or a freak of secretion. Some pity her
ignorance in mistaking the Spirit to be other than a creation of the Mind.
One, however, with mystic and unsatisfied eyes, still remembering his old
unsuccessful quest, wonders that there is still someone who seeks for a
Beyond. Savitri
goes on across her silent self. She comes to a road thronged with a luminous
company of gods, goddesses and beings rushing towards the world to save it.
She asks them the road which she must tread to reach the birth-place of the
Mystic Fire, the abode of her secret soul. One of them replies to her that
they all come from her own hidden soul, they are the occult gods who help men
in their struggles. He asks her to follow the world's winding highway to its
source where she will find in deep, unfrequented Silence the Fire and the
silent soul she is searching for. Savitri
follows the direction and enters a brooding hush where is felt the silent
nearness of the soul. |