THE COMPOSITION OF SAVITRI

Richard Hartz

Savitri and the Record of Yoga

1

(Mother India, September 2002)

In a letter written in 1932, Sri Aurobindo explained how he had arrived at the knowledge on which he and the Mother based their work:

We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward going and realising Force. So although we have faith, (and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?) we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter.

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo created a symbol of the victory of this dynamic realising Force over the forces opposing it in the field of Matter and human life. The uniqueness of Savitri among works of literature lies in the fact that it is not merely a product of the imagination, however beautiful, or even the expression of a purely subjective mystical experience. It announces the action of a Force that could change the world.

It is now possible to get a fairly precise and detailed picture of some of the “testing” that had given Sri Aurobindo confidence in the effectivity of such a Force. His Yogic diary, the Record of Yoga, which he kept with some regularity from 1912 to 1920 and resumed briefly in 1927, has recently been published in book-form for the first time. The text runs to about 1,500 pages in two volumes. Its publication could profoundly affect future research in several areas of Sri Aurobindo’s thought and work, including Savitri.

Sri Aurobindo’s often-quoted statement that Savitri is “the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind” suggests that it may have something in common with the Record of Yoga. The Mother, likewise, described Savitri as a “daily record” of Sri Aurobindo’s experiences. But if we want to have a clear idea of how Sri Aurobindo recorded his inner life in Savitri, we encounter the difficulty that his epic is a legend as well as a symbol, besides being a poem and not a diary. Its structure is not chronological, but literary. Though it has been called a spiritual autobiography, reading it in that way is beset with pitfalls.

It might help, therefore, to look into the other record of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana, the diary he kept for many years. His Record of Yoga could be expected to provide clues to exactly how Savitri reflects his Yogic development. For a number of reasons, a comparison between Savitri and the Record is not at all easy to make. But that should not deter us from an approach that is sure to yield valuable insights.

The first problem we meet in trying to compare Savitri with the Record of Yoga is due to the fact that Sri Aurobindo wrote most of Savitri, at least 80% of it, after the period of the Record. The explicitly Yogic books and cantos—especially “The Yoga of the King”, “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” and “The Book of Yoga”—were written almost entirely after the discontinuation of the Record, whose last dated entry was made on 31 October 1927. It must have been around this time that Sri Aurobindo’s conception of Savitri began to undergo the change implied by his first published letter on the poem, dated 1931, in which he said of the earlier version that “in that form it would not have been a `magnum opus’ at all” and, besides, that “it would have been a legend and not a symbol.” In spite of the overlap between the Record and the writing of Savitri from 1916 to 1920 and again in 1927, the narrative poem Sri Aurobindo was working on at that time offered limited scope for including the kind of experiences recorded in the diary of his Yoga.

As a result, parallels between Savitri and the Record are mostly to be found in passages in the epic that were written from the late 1920s onwards. Sri Aurobindo often restated in a poetic form experiences he had noted years earlier in the matter-of-fact style of his diary. I will give some examples of this later on. But first I will show that from the beginning of the composition of the poem, even before Sri Aurobindo had begun to describe his Yogic experiences in it on a large scale, his treatment of the theme of Savitri reflected in significant ways the sadhana described in the Record of Yoga. This connection, which goes back to the first known drafts of Savitri in 1916, becomes evident not so much when we look at separate lines and passages as when we examine the central ideas of the early poem in relation to the experiments and experiences documented in the Record during the same period.

The entry of 23 January 1913 may be taken, more or less at random, as a typical example of these experiments and experiences. About two months earlier, on 26 November 1912, Sri Aurobindo had written: “The regular record of the sadhana begins today”. Although a few diary entries go back as far as 1909 and 1911, and during two or three of the earlier months of 1912 we find almost daily entries under the headings “Record of the Yoga” and “Journal of Yoga”, a new phase seems to have commenced on 26 November 1912.

Some of the first observations noted in this “regular record of the sadhana” concern attempts to predict and influence events in the Balkans, where war was then raging. In the midst of entries recording (among other things) his successes and failures in these attempts, Sri Aurobindo wrote under the date “Jan 23d”:

Today the aishwarya and trikaldrishti suddenly developed an unprecedented force;... ¹

The Sanskrit words used here, which are typical of the terminology of the Record, have to be explained before proceeding further. Sri Aurobindo used hundreds of Sanskrit terms in the Record, evidently because he found he could describe his experiences most accurately in that way. He defined “aishwarya” as “effectiveness of the Will acting on object or event without the aid of physical means”.² This is one of the three “siddhis of power” which are among the eight siddhis (ashtasiddhi) forming the third part of the vijnana chatushtaya. The vijnana chatushtaya is the third of the seven divisions of the sapta chatushtaya.

The sapta chatushtaya is the system consisting of seven (sapta) sections with four elements (chatushtaya) in each, revealed to Sri Aurobindo as a “programme” for his Yoga, apparently soon after he came to Pondicherry.³ He explained this system in “The Yoga of Self Perfection”, Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga. There the last and most general chatushtaya—the siddhi chatushtaya—is treated first, in order to make clear the meaning of “self perfection”. The other six divisions are summarised in the tenth chapter, “The Elements of Perfection”. These are taken up one by one in the remainder of the incomplete Part Four, reaching as far as trikaladrishti or time-vision, the second member of the third chatushtaya.

The sapta chatushtaya is the key to understanding the Record of Yoga. Explanations of this system have, therefore, been published in the Introduction and Appendixes to the book. In one of these explanations, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said about the powers included in the ashtasiddhi, such as aishwarya:

All siddhis exist already in Nature. They exist in you. Only owing to habitual limitations you make a use of them which is mechanical and limited. By breaking these limitations, one is able to get the conscious and voluntary use of them.⁴

It is these siddhis that are described in Savitri as

In the Record, the “siddhis of power”—aishwarya, ishita and vashita—are often referred to collectively as tapas or tapas-siddhi.

“Trikaldrishti”, the other Sanskrit term that occurs in the first sentence of the entry of 23 January 1913, is the vision of the three times—the past, present and future. Tri means “three”, kala means “time”, and drishti means “vision”. Sri Aurobindo was interested primarily in being able to see the future, because his aim was to manifest something on earth that does not yet exist here in a visible form. He referred to trikaladrishti in the literal sense in a line in Savitri:

In the Record, he distinguished telepathic and decisive trikaladrishti. Telepathic trikaladrishti relies on the use of telepathy, which consists of two faculties: prakamya and vyapti. These “siddhis of knowledge” are two more of the eight siddhis of the ashtasiddhi. (The remaining three are “siddhis of the body”.) Prakamya means extending the power of the mind to know things beyond its normal range: thoughts of others, events at a distance and so on. It involves a sort of projection of the consciousness. Vyapti, on the other hand, means receiving thoughts, feelings and other movements as they come to our minds from outside ourselves. This is receptive vyapti; there is also a communicative vyapti by which we can send our own thoughts, etc., out into the world and to other minds.

So telepathic trikaladrishti employs prakamya and vyapti, constituting telepathy, to know the forces determining events. One who sees all the forces at work may be able to predict what will happen; knowing the invisible forces which are not normally known, he is in a position to foresee otherwise unexpected events which these forces are preparing to bring about. However, the play of forces is exceedingly complex and this way of knowing the future is always uncertain.

Decisive trikaladrishti, on the other hand, foresees the future directly, without relying on a telepathic vision of the forces at work. It simply sees in advance what is destined to happen. But this can occur on different planes. An event foreseen by such trikaladrishti may be predetermined to happen according to one plane of determinism, yet this might not take into account the possibility of a totally new force intervening from a higher plane and altering the course of events. This is the situation represented in Savitri.

But what happened on 23 January 1913, when Sri Aurobindo experienced an unprecedented development of the faculties of aishwarya and trikaladrishti? This is how the entry continues:

... while watching the movement of ants on the wall opposite, it was suddenly perceived that every slightest movement of the particular ant observed in each case followed the anticipatory observation; wherever my idea turned, there the ant, with but slight variations, immediately corrected, turned to follow it; when the forceful will was applied, there was sometimes a slight, but unavailing struggle. This observation covered some half hundred successive movements of various ants and was marred by only one actual and final failure.⁷

The mention of a failure—here, an ant that never obeyed the will applied to it—is, incidentally, a typical instance of the objectivity of Sri Aurobindo’s recording of his experiments, which gives his diary some credibility from a scientific point of view.

But what do ants have to do with Savitri? First of all, in passing, we may perhaps detect a personal reminiscence of Sri Aurobindo’s observation of ants in Book Seven, Canto Four, written many years later, where the “sense-shackled human mind” says:

The apparent insignificance of these creatures should not lead us to regard Sri Aurobindo’s references to them in the Record of Yoga as trivial and unworthy of comparison with his sublime preoccupations in Savitri. In a chapter of The Life Divine entitled “The Pure Existent”, published in the Arya in April 1915 not long after his experimentation with ants, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

If we look... not at mass of quantity but force of quality, we shall say that the ant is greater than the solar system it inhabits....⁹

But the relevance and importance of this experiment with ants—and similar experiments, in which Sri Aurobindo observed the flights of birds and the behaviour of cats, dogs, squirrels and other animals as well as humans in the immediate environment which was his sadhana-kshetra or field of exercise—becomes more evident as the entry of 23 January 1913 continues. Influencing events in the Balkans, which he resumed recording the next day, involved the exercise of the same faculty of will-power as influencing the movements of ants on the wall. Sri Aurobindo goes on after the description of his experiment with ants:

If this force can be rendered permanent and generalised so as to apply to all objects and subjects, then human omniscience and omnipotence in the field permitted by the Infinite are attained. It is a matter of time only; the perfectibility of knowledge and power have today been finally and irrevocably proved.¹⁰

This extraordinary conclusion, relating the movements of ants to the attainment of omniscience and omnipotence, brings us back to Savitri. While ants receive a passing mention in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, the words “omniscience” and “omnipotence” express the very nature of the Knowledge-Force whose manifestation, transforming the human mind and will, is the heart of the meaning of Savitri:

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

2

(Mother India, October 2002)

Throughout the Record of Yoga, we see Sri Aurobindo gradually perfecting the faculties of knowledge and power, trikaladrishti and tapas, in a progressive movement towards a consummation he envisioned as a state of omniscience and omnipotence, insofar as such a state is at all possible for an embodied being on earth. In Savitri, though the Sanskrit terms used constantly in the Record of Yoga do not occur, the concepts expressed by the words trikaladrishti and tapas were central to the poem from its earliest versions and developed as Sri Aurobindo ascended to higher and higher planes in the scale leading from mind to supermind.

The role of Narad as the personification of trikaladrishti, time‑vision, was part of the legend itself, in which Narad’s only function is to foretell the death of Satyavan. In Sri Aurobindo’s epic, however, Narad is more than a poetic and dramatic recreation of a mythological character. There is a visionary authenticity, evidently drawn from experience, in lines such as these written in 1916:          

Narad represents pure trikaladrishti separated from the power that can sometimes intervene and modify the events predestined by the present balance of the world-forces. The power that so intervenes, for which the most general word is tapas, is embodied in Savitri.

The Record of Yoga shows Sri Aurobindo’s preoccupation with perfecting trikaladrishti and tapas in their separate operations and working out their interrelation. These two terms occur in his diary more than a thousand times each. Their combination is usually abbreviated T² (since the words trikaladrishti and tapas both begin with the letter t). T² is mentioned a few hundred times in addition to the separate occurrences of trikaladrishti and tapas. There is also a T³ which includes telepathy along with trikaladrishti and tapas. T³ was regarded as inferior to T², since the reliance on telepathy meant that the future was foreseen by extrapolation from a knowledge of the forces at work in the present. A direct perception of what is destined to happen comes when telepathic trikaladrishti is replaced by decisive trikaladrishti. The combination of tapas with telepathic and non-telepathic trikaladrishti constituted T³ and T², respectively.

In 1927, shortly before Sri Aurobindo stopped keeping a diary of his Yoga, there was a further step. Trikaladrishti and tapas, knowledge and will, were merging together so that they were no longer distinguishable. The will for something to happen contained within it the vision of its own fulfilment, while the vision of what should happen contained the force that would automatically bring it about. The disappearance of the difference between trikaladrishti and tapas caused Sri Aurobindo to drop the “2” from T2 at a certain stage and call it simply “T” (written once in the manuscript with an unusually large capital T) or “gnostic T”. This does not seem to stand for any single word. Sri Aurobindo noted that “when it acts it is of the nature of omniscience and omnipotence”.² This began to emerge in January 1927, though T² and even T³ continued up to the end of the Record later that year.

The relation of these faculties to the principal events of Savitri can be explained in a simplified way by referring to Sri Aurobindo’s experiments with ants. When he was watching the movements of ants and foreseeing where they would go without interfering, he was using pure trikaladrishti and playing the passive part of Narad. But when he intervened by applying his will, he assumed an active role comparable to that of Savitri.

We have seen one example of these experiments with ants in the Record entry of 23 January 1913. Several months later, on 7 September 1913, Sri Aurobindo made the following observations, this time with regard to the movements of an individual ant:

An ant was climbing up the wall in an upward stream of ants; there was no sign of its reversing its progress; but the trikaldrishti saw that the ant would turn and go down, not upwards. At first it made a movement of uncertainty, then proceeded upward, then suddenly left the stream and went steadily and swiftly downwards.      

A subsequent perception of the reason for this abrupt change of course brought an insight into the mechanism of telepathic trikaladrishti:

Afterwards the source of the trikaldrishti was seen, a coming movement of pranic energy, prepared in the sat‑Brahman, latent both to the waking consciousness of the ant and my own, but caught by the vijnanamaya drishti.³

In this case, Sri Aurobindo did not intervene with his will to influence the movement of the ant. He confined himself, Naradlike, to exercising his trikaladrishti and foreseeing what would happen, given the forces at work. But suppose that instead of letting the ant turn and go down, he had intervened actively with his will as he had done in the other experiment. Then he would have acted like Savitri and the outcome could have been different. After a brief interruption of its ascent and a struggle with the downward push of pranic energy, the ant might have rejoined the “upward stream of ants”, like Satyavan coming back to life.

Elsewhere in the Record of Yoga, the interrelation between trikaladrishti and tapas is analysed in ways that are of utmost relevance to Savitri. On 14 December 1914, for example, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

There is a struggle between static perception of event and dynamic perception of event (passive and active Chit). The latter which alters the event predestined by the ensemble of forces by a personal intervention (ie of higher forces) is becoming rapidly stronger....⁴

In Savitri, Narad gives the static perception of the event of the death of Satyavan as determined by the present forces acting on the material plane. He leaves the dynamic perception of the same event to Savitri, who intervenes with a higher force and so “alters the event predestined by the ensemble of forces”.  

The difference between the static and dynamic ways of perceiving an event can be seen alternatively in terms of a struggle of the forces of the past and present with the forces of the future. On 16 April 1914, Sri Aurobindo entered in his diary:

The whole struggle in the siddhi now is between the present & the future, between the telepathic knowledge that sees & admits the present & the vijnanamaya that reaches beyond to the future, between the force that admits & manipulates present forces & the force that aims at annulling & replacing or transforming them rapidly into the image of their vijnanamaya & anandamaya equivalents....⁵

Five years later, the forces of the future seemed to be growing stronger. On 6 July 1919, Sri Aurobindo observed:

Trikaldrishti, tapas, telepathy are now combining definitely into one movement which is beginning to rise above the constant uneven balancings of the two opposite perceptions, that of the powers and tendencies of the present and what they mean and presage, and that of the other powers and forces which attempt to create a future not bound by the probabilities of the present.⁶

The perception of forces at work to create a future not bound by the limited possibilities of the present is articulated clearly and powerfully by Savitri in her dialogue with Death. What is especially noteworthy from the point of view of a comparison with the Record of Yoga is that she voices this perception even in the earliest versions of the poem. This suggests that Sri Aurobindo’s choice of the legend of Savitri as the subject of a literary work was, in all likelihood, related to developments in his Yoga connected with trikaladrishti and tapas and the struggle between the forces of the present and the future.

Sri Aurobindo portrays Death as the arch‑conservative who, even in one of the first drafts of Savitri, warns his antagonist:

In contrast to Death, Savitri is the arch-revolutionary. Here is part of her spirited reply, as it appears in the same manuscript of 1916:

But what is the source of Savitri’s unheard-of power to trample on the law of Death? It is this, that when she says “to arise in freedom I was born”, it is not an egoistic freedom that she claims. This leads us to another important relation between the early versions of Savitri and the Record of Yoga.

Two opposite expressions occur as far back as the 1916 drafts of the poem: “slave of Nature” and “slave of God”. Death, in his first words to Savitri, calls her a slave of Nature.⁹ And in fact, this is precisely what the human being normally is. There is one way to stop being a slave of Nature and yet continue to live and act in the world. It is to become a slave of the Divine, to transcend the laws of the finite by surrendering to the Infinite.

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

3

(Mother India, November 2002)

The phrase “slave of God” occurs in a speech of the Godhead into whom Death is transformed after Savitri’s victory, a passage that is now part of Book Eleven, “The Book of Everlasting Day”. But this passage in its original form, which already included the line in question, was written as early as 1916. It is found in the notebook used by Sri Aurobindo for his first known draft of the poem, consisting of some eight hundred lines and not yet divided into books or cantos. This nearly complete draft of what would evolve into an epic of thirty times that length is preceded in the small notebook by a three‑page draft of the opening—dated, on the second page, “August 8th 9th 1916”—beginning with the lines:

After breaking off on the third page, at the point where Savitri arrives at the place where she will meet Satyavan, Sri Aurobindo started again in almost the same way, possibly a couple of months later. This time he continued and, after some time, began dating the draft every few pages. It was perhaps due to the unusual flow of inspiration he was experiencing that he became interested at this stage in recording the progress he was making with the poem from day to day. The dates in the margins of the manuscript—October 17, 18 and 19—show that on three days in 1916 he drafted much of what eventually became Books Eight, Nine and Ten of the epic, “The Book of Death”, “The Book of Eternal Night” and “The Book of the Double Twilight”. However, there was no double twilight as yet, but only something like “The Dream Twilight of the Ideal”, where much of Savitri’s debate with Death took place. The draft stops abruptly at the point where the twilight vanishes:

The remainder of the notebook was used mostly for the rewriting of passages that had already been drafted. This was the beginning of the long process of revising and expanding Savitri, which would continue until 1950. But there are also some passages for the concluding section of the poem, where Death is transfigured into a luminous God. Among these passages is a speech of this God to Savitri, a flight of sustained inspiration which, as we can see from a study of Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga, has an exact relation to his state of consciousness at the time when it was written. Here is a substantial part of this extraordinary passage:

This passage was ultimately expanded by twenty lines or so, with a number of changes in the order and wording of the lines.² But compared with the drastic mutations undergone by many other passages in Savitri in the course of Sri Aurobindo’s quest for a spiritually revelatory perfection, it came relatively close to its final form at what seems to have been the first writing.

The reason for this must be that what is expressed here is something Sri Aurobindo had realised in its full intensity fairly early in his sadhana and, moreover, something that was essential to his original conception of Savitri. The Record of Yoga supports the first part of this explanation. Sri Aurobindo began Savitri during a long gap in the Record extending from March 1916 up to January 1917. (In one sense, this is unfortunate for us, because if the Record had continued through that period there might have been some mention of the poem Sri Aurobindo was then beginning to write.)³ When the diary resumes on 9 January 1917, we read in the first entry: “Shakti on the basis of dasya is well founded.”⁴  

Now, dasya is the term used in the Record of Yoga for the state described in Savitri as being a “slave of God”. Dasya is, literally, the condition of being a slave, a dasa (masculine) or dasi (feminine); the latter word, dasi, is used by Sri Aurobindo when he wishes to make the image of the slave explicit. Submission and surrender are English equivalents of dasya, but they occur only occasionally in the Record, while dasya occurs hundreds of times.⁵

The “slave of God” passage in Savitri is a vivid description of what is called in the Record of Yoga “the dasya of the supreme degree which obeys helplessly the direct impulse of the Master”.⁶ Paradoxically, this slavery is the key to liberation in action, this defeat and surrender of the ego are the victory of the spirit and this helplessness is the secret of omnipotence.

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

4

(Mother India, December 2002)

Dasya or surrender, literally “servitude” to the Divine, has several degrees, defined by Sri Aurobindo in more detail in the Record of Yoga than in any other writing of his. The phrase “slave of God” in Savitri—which, as we have seen, was introduced into the poem very early in its composition, midway through the main period of the Record—acquires a richer, more precise meaning when it is understood to indicate the highest of these stages.

As early as 26 November 1912, in the second sentence of the new phase of his diary which he had identified as the beginning of the “regular record of the sadhana”, Sri Aurobindo assessed his progress in the Yoga of self-perfection with these words:

What has been effected with some finality & thoroughness, is the submission or dasyam.¹

Evidently, this was the indispensable basis for all that would come afterwards. A few months prior to this, on 1 July 1912, he had recorded the beginning of “a new life, that is to say, a new type of action, starting with... the final inevitable seal on the dasyabhava.”² In this long entry at the beginning of the “Journal of Yoga” which he kept during that month, Sri Aurobindo wrote an extensive account of three forms of dasya.

The first is simple dasya, later called primary dasya. It is defined as free obedience, the attitude of the servant who retains a certain independence:

The simple dasyam is that obedience to the divine impulsion which is self‑chosen and depends on the individual’s intelligence of God’s will and his consent, his readiness to obey. The Purusha is still karta [doer] and anumanta [giver of the sanction], a servant of God, not His slave.³

This definition of simple or primary dasya as the state of being a “servant of God” implies already that to become “His slave” is a higher stage. But the essential principle—that one is increased, not diminished, by self‑subordination to something greater than oneself—is the same for every degree of dasya. This is the kind of service that is characterised in a line in Savitri as “a spiritual sovereignty”.⁴

Then there is the transition to the double or secondary dasya, about which Sri Aurobindo writes:

The great step bridging the transition from the simple to the double dasyam is the renouncement of the kartritwa abhimana [the sense of being the doer], by which we perceive that Prakriti is the only doer of all our actions voluntary or involuntary from the most deliberately concerted endeavour even to the simplest trifle....

In this transition, the sense of independent action that distinguishes “servanthood” from unconditional “servitude”, or dasya in the full sense of the word, begins to be lost:

At first the consciousness tends to make a false division claiming the movement itself to be our own although the determining impulse is felt as a driving or a pressure proceeding from infinite Nature above or around us. The wearing away of this division marks a farther attenuation of servanthood and deepening towards the divine servitude.⁵

The second degree of dasya is related to what in the Record of Yoga is termed Kalibhava or becoming one in our nature with Kali, the universal Prakriti or Shakti. Here, Kali is not the goddess of popular Hinduism. The use of the names Krishna and Kali for the Divine and his Shakti is a feature of the Record of Yoga up to 1920 which can be found also in Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Aphorisms, written around 1913.

In the Record entry of 12 November 1913, under the heading “Ahankara‑Mukti‑Siddhi” (perfection of the release from the ego), Sri Aurobindo described the state of Kalibhava. After observing that the sense of “aham karta” (“I am the doer”) had now been replaced by “kartri brahma” (Brahman as the doer), and that likewise the sense that “I am the knower”, “I am the enjoyer”, “I am the upholder” and “I am the witness” had been replaced by Brahman as each of these things, he continued:

What is left of the aham [“I”] is a kendra [centre] of action, a kendra of knowledge, a kendra of vision, a kendra of enjoyment. In this kendra Kali receives the will of God, thinks it out in the idea, fulfils it in action, watches its fulfilment and sends up the bhoga [enjoyment] to God, becoming herself the will, the action, the vision, the bhoga, the knowledge.⁶

On 16 August 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a condition of “complete Kalibhava”, in which

the form of the egoistic consciousness with a name attached to it is repelled whenever it throws its shadow on the central consciousness, & there is instead the conception of the ego as an ansha [portion] of Prakriti or a vibhuti [manifestation of divine power] serving as an instrument and slave of the Ishwara or Para Purusha [Lord or Supreme Being].⁷

The last words point beyond the impersonal secondary dasya, in which the personality of the Ishwara is only indirectly perceived behind the workings of Prakriti, and suggest a third form of dasya to which the words “instrument and slave” are applicable. The realisation of this tertiary or triple dasya is sometimes associated in the Record of Yoga with the emergence of the Krishnakali bhava, where the presence of the Ishwara as Krishna is directly felt dominating the surrendered Kali‑consciousness of the Prakriti.

Sri Aurobindo’s definition of the third degree of dasya changed from 1912 to 1914. At first, triple dasya was regarded as the last stage; then it became the penultimate degree, with a fourth and supreme degree beyond it; finally, tertiary dasya became again the highest form, but was divided into three stages, the last of which corresponded to the supreme degree in the previous system. Its essential characteristic, however, was always yantrabhava, the state of being an instrument of the Lord.

All the stages of tertiary dasya need not be explained here, for it is mainly the third and highest stage that concerns us. This differs from the lower stages in that Prakriti is purely a “channel & not an agent” and the compulsion from the Ishwara is “direct, omnipresent and immanent”. Sri Aurobindo wrote on 7 July 1919 that he was aware of the Ishwara

driving the instrument with an absolute and immediately and intensely felt decisiveness of control as if it were being pushed by him with his hand upon it and it vibrated with the ananda of the touch and the driving.⁸

In Savitri, this state is very poetically evoked in a few lines of the passage I have quoted from the 1916 version:

The next line,

describes the effect of this condition of yantrabhava on the conscious instrument when, as Sri Aurobindo says in the Record, it begins to vibrate “with the ananda of the touch and the driving”.

But the image of the instrument must have seemed at times to be too mechanical to represent the living experience it was intended to convey. In “The Mystery of Love”, a chapter of Part Three of The Synthesis of Yoga published in the Arya in November 1918 (and not revised thereafter), Sri Aurobindo summarised some of the stages of dasya, simplifying the elaborate scheme found in the Record of Yoga during the same period. He used the images of the servant, the instrument and the slave:

Obedience is the sign of the servant, but that is the lowest stage of this relation, dasya. Afterwards we do not obey, but move to his will as the string replies to the finger of the musician. To be the instrument is this higher stage of self‑surrender and submission. But this is the living and loving instrument and it ends in the whole nature of our being becoming the slave of God, rejoicing in his possession and its own blissful subjection to the divine grasp and mastery. With a passionate delight it does all he wills it to do without questioning and bears all he would have it bear, because what it bears is the burden of the beloved being.¹⁰

Here Sri Aurobindo uses the same phrase as in Savitri, “slave of God”, and connects its meaning with one further aspect of dasya, the “passionate delight” that accompanies the total surrender. In the Record this is called madhura bhava. On 27 March 1914 Sri Aurobindo wrote, after explaining the three stages of tertiary dasya:

The bhava of the dasya tends to its right relation of the bandini dasi with the characteristic madhur bhava of that relation....¹¹

The word bhava means a state of being or especially feeling, and is also used for particular relations between the soul and the Divine analogous to human relations. Madhura means sweet, but the notion of sweetness is inadequate to render the ineffable bliss of the relation with the divine Lover which is called madhura bhava. Dasya with madhura bhava takes a form audaciously compared by Sri Aurobindo to the relation of the bandini dasi, the “captive slave‑girl”, to her Master. There seems to be an allusion to this in the 1916 version of Savitri:

The last line—which corresponds to the phrase “rejoicing in his possession and its own blissful subjection” in The Synthesis of Yoga—later disappeared. The second line was interchanged with the first and became:

The bandini dasi or “captive slave‑girl” is clearly related to the madhura dasi or “sweet slave‑girl” who is mentioned in the Record on 1 January 1915:

Kali [i.e. Prakriti or Shakti] is now everywhere revealed in the bhava of the madhura dasi dominated by Krishna and ministering to his bhoga.¹⁴

But there is no weakness in this submission of Kali to Krishna. Her surrender is sometimes referred to as “dasya of the power” and she is also called the dasi ishwari.¹⁵ If in relation to Krishna, her Lord, she is an enamoured slave, in relation to the world she is the Ishwari, the all-ruling Goddess. For hers is

the aishwarya [sovereignty] of the Dasi empowered by the Lover and Master, the real aishwarya being his, the executive aishwarya hers.¹⁶

The “Krishna Kali relation founded on madhura dasya”¹⁷ is thus the foundation of tapas-siddhi, the power to change the world. This is the power that manifests through Savitri, the power that is one with knowledge and with the love of which Sri Aurobindo wrote in his epic in that tremendous mantra:

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

5

(Mother India, January 2003)

When Savitri, after hearing the voice of the godhead, returns to earth drawing the soul of Satyavan with her, she sees above her as she falls the face of a youth changing into that of a woman. The symbolism of this vision, described in terms evocative of Krishna and Kali, reveals another connection between Savitri and the experiences documented in Sri Aurobindo’s diary, the Record of Yoga.

The passage in its earliest form, found in the notebook used by Sri Aurobindo in 1916 for his first known draft of the poem, is remarkably similar to the final version. It begins at the bottom of the page from which the lines on the “beautiful slave of God” were reproduced in a previous instalment. The face of the youth is seen first:

The crown of peacock plumes, along with other features, identifies the youth unmistakably as Krishna, reminding us of Sri Aurobindo’s early translation of a poem of Vidyapati where Krishna is referred to as “Caanou”:

The smile of this youth seems to be the smile referred to in Sri Aurobindo’s explanation of hasya, “laughter”, the last element of the first division of the sapta chatushtaya, about which he writes:

It is in our internal being the image of the smile of Srikrishna playing, bálavat [childlike], as the eternal balaka [child] and kumara [youth] in the garden of the world.³

Krishna’s essential qualities of delight and beauty were brought out even more clearly when Sri Aurobindo added two new lines in his next version of the passage depicting Savitri’s return to earth. The new lines are italicised below; here the wording of the sentence is already the same as in the printed text:

This youth evidently symbolises the Sarva-sundara, the All-beautiful, whom Sri Aurobindo by that time was seeing wherever he looked, even in what would appear as ugliness to ordinary eyes. On 30 May 1915, for example, he had written in his diary:

The Krishna-darshana [vision of Krishna] is reestablished in its first intensity; the difficulty of the unbeautiful face concealing the Sarva-sundara is conquered in fact, though it attempts to return & does recur as a reminiscent experience.⁵

Krishna as the Anandamaya Purusha, the Soul of bliss in the world and beyond the world, is likewise the Enjoyer (bhokta) alluded to in the Record under the heading Krishnadarshana in the entry of 8 July 1914:

Strong sukshma-physical perception at meals of the universal bhokta, Bala Krishna, behind all taking the bhoga of the ego for himself without the knowledge of the ego—⁶

A week later, however, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a different, though complementary experience:

It is less Krishna than Kali who is now manifest in all beings & things, but that is as it should be. Otherwise, the Krishnadarshana itself would be incomplete.⁷

For if the vision of Krishna, the epiphany of divine personality in its various degrees and intensities, is regarded in the Record of Yoga as superior to the purely impersonal vision of the Brahman, Sri Aurobindo found it equally necessary to fuse perception of the “masculine” aspect of the integral reality with perception of its “feminine” aspect. In Savitri the relation between these aspects is symbolised, first of all, by Satyavan and Savitri themselves, and it is significant that it is the woman who incarnates the force, the Shakti, that can conquer death. As the poem grew, the theme of the “Two who are One”⁸ developed in many poetic and philosophical guises, beginning with the passage now found near the end of Book Eleven.

The description of the face seen by Savitri continues in the first draft:

The dark beauty of this woman and the epithets “turbulent”, “terrible”, “shadowy” and “stormy” are all suggestive of the “terrible though always loving and beneficent Kali”,⁹ of whose might and glory Sri Aurobindo wrote around 1913 in an essay, “The Evolutionary Aim in Yoga”:

For us the embrace of Krishna is enough and the glory of the all‑puissant bosom of Kali. We have to transcend & possess Nature, not to kill her.¹⁰

Though Kali as she appears in the Record of Yoga shows few signs of being related to the Hindu goddess with that name—normally considered to be the consort of Shiva, not Krishna—Sri Aurobindo’s choice of this name of the Shakti was not altogether unconnected with the tradition surrounding the goddess Kali, especially in Bengal. His respect for that tradition is evident in writings such as Essays on the Gita, where in the chapter on Kurukshetra he observes, after speaking of that “repellent aspect of existence” which yet, perhaps, “holds in itself some secret of the final harmony”:¹¹

It is only a few religions which have had the courage to say without any reserve, like the Indian, that this enigmatic World‑Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure not only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in her blood‑stained dance of destruction and to say, “This too is the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the strength, adore.” And it is significant that the religion which has had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage, has succeeded in creating a profound and wide‑spread spirituality such as no other can parallel. For truth is the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul. Tasyai satyam ayatanam.¹²

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

6

(Mother India, February 2003)

If the smiling youth seen by Savitri as she falls towards the earth is Krishna and the dark woman is Kali, the manner in which the face changes from one to the other while remaining “rapturously the same” brings to mind the references in the Record of Yoga to Krishna-Kali-darshana, the unified vision of Krishna and Kali.¹ Not that a description like the one in Savitri actually occurs in the Record. Sri Aurobindo often recorded seeing symbolic forms with the subtle sight, including some instances of “images changing into each other”.² But the typically brief entries on the “darshana” of Krishna and Kali suggest rather an inner spiritual perception, as when Sri Aurobindo refers to seeing “Krishna with Kali in the purusha [man], Kali with Krishna in the stri [woman]”,³ distinguishes seeing “Krishna & Kali, not yet KrishnaKali in human beings”,⁴ or writes:

After a long struggle the covering consciousness has once more been removed & the Krishna Kali once more occupies all manifesting freely in all often with the intensity & directly, or else with the disguise of the form & mentality.⁵

Admittedly, this does not make it very easy to visualise what Sri Aurobindo saw. But the place of the experience in his sadhana can be established from the Record and its philosophical implications inferred with the aid of his other writings, shedding some light on the significance of the apparently related vision in Savitri.

In the sapta chatushtaya, which provides a framework for the systematic notations in the Record of Yoga, Krishna and Kali are listed as the first two elements of the fifth division, the karma chatushtaya. In the discussion of dasya in a previous instalment,⁶ we have seen that the blissful submission of Kali, the Prakriti or Shakti, to Krishna, the Purusha or Ishwara, is the secret of true power. This is “Madhura dasya of the KrishnaKali relation”⁷ or “Kali-Krishna bhava in the personality; together, dasya of the Kali-prakriti as expressive of the Krishna-purusha”.⁸ It is the “subjective base”⁹ of karma, divine action in the world, which is the third member of the fifth chatushtaya;¹⁰ the fourth member is kama, which here does not mean desire in the ordinary sense, but divine enjoyment, as Sri Aurobindo explains in The Synthesis of Yoga:

Whatever desire will remain, if that name be given, will be the divine desire, the will to delight of the Purusha enjoying in his freedom and perfection the action of the perfected Prakriti and all her members. The Prakriti will take up the whole nature into the law of her higher divine truth and act in that law offering up the universal enjoyment of her action and being to the Anandamaya Ishwara, the Lord of existence and works and Spirit of bliss, who presides over and governs her workings.¹¹

In the Record, this taking up of the action of Prakriti into “the law of her higher divine truth” is termed daivi prakriti, divine Nature, which is a name for the third element of the second or shakti chatushtaya. But until 1914 and occasionally even after that, Sri Aurobindo referred to this element of the sapta chatushtaya as chandibhava. Chandi, “the fierce one”, is an epithet of Kali, and chandibhava was defined as “the force of Kali manifest in the temperament”.¹² The intensity of the action of the divine Force when it enters into human nature to transform it perhaps explains why this Force in general, including various personalities of the Shakti, was designated by the name of Kali. Sri Aurobindo conveyed a sense of this intensity in one of his aphorisms:

Who can bear Kali rushing into the system in her fierce force and burning godhead? Only the man whom Krishna already possesses.¹³

In recording the progress of the shakti chatushtaya, however, Sri Aurobindo usually referred not to Kali but to Mahakali and the three other aspects of daivi prakriti. The importance of Mahakali, the Shakti of strength and swiftness, in relation to the other Shaktis is clarified in his last diary entry of 1912. After describing the meticulous method of Mahasaraswati, by which “the Yogasiddhi has been justified... by slow, small and steadily progressive processes”, Sri Aurobindo observed:

But, if continued, this method would render success in this life impossible. The method chosen for preparation has been Mahasaraswati’s, but the method chosen for fulfilment is Mahakali’s in the Mahasaraswati mould.¹⁴

By the time Sri Aurobindo wrote The Mother, around 1927, he seems to have arrived at a more even balance of Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. Yet as late as in 1938 he wrote that the “combination of Krishna and Mahakali is one that has a great power in this Yoga”.¹⁵ This statement is reminiscent of the Record of Yoga in the importance it gives to Mahakali among the aspects of the Shakti, as well as in joining Kali, though here under the name of Mahakali, with Krishna.¹⁶

All this pertains to the manifestation of the divine Shakti in the nature and action of the individual Yogi—the shakti chatushtaya and karma chatushtaya in the system revealed to Sri Aurobindo as a programme for his Yoga. But there is also the question of how the rest of the world is perceived by such an individual, since his spiritualised existence in the midst of an incurably unspiritual universe could serve no purpose except to lead him to a door of exit from the meaningless drama in which he has somehow become entangled. Therefore, the fifth or karma chatushtaya depends on the sixth chatushtaya, the brahma chatushtaya, which is concerned with realisation of the omnipresent Reality, brahman. Moreover, the vision of this Reality, called brahmadarshana, is incomplete unless it is filled with Krishna-Kali-darshana, that is, unless the perception of the unity of all includes the vision of the presence and working everywhere of the same Krishna and Kali, Ishwara and Shakti, whose manifestation in the internal being is the basis of a divine action. Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter in 1916, after explaining how an absolute equality makes us “able to hold consistently and vividly the settled perception of the One in all things and beings”:

When the Unity has been well founded, the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power,—Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions....¹⁷

In the Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo had noted in an entry in 1913 the dependence of the karma chatushtaya on the full realisation of the “fourfold Brahman”—meaning the four elements of the brahma chatushtaya, whose formula is sarvam anantam jnanam anandam brahma (Brahman as the All, as the Infinite, as universal Knowledge and as self-existent Delight):

Kali and Krishna are manifest, but not in their full power and being, and because they are not manifest in a sufficiently full power and being, therefore kama and karma linger. The fourfold Brahman, on which that manifestation rests, is realised subjectively, but not yet, except initially, in its objective effects.¹⁸

An entry written on 16 January 1917—a week after Sri Aurobindo resumed keeping his diary following the interruption during which he had begun Savitri—shows the relation between Brahmadarshana and Krishna-Kali-darshana. Here we see that Ananda Brahman, the last term in the fourfold realisation of the impersonal Brahman, is the foundation for the dual self-revelation of the divine personality as Krishna and Kali:

Brahmadarshana has become again & more firmly Anandabrahmadarshana and is now being refilled with Krishna-Kali-darshana.¹⁹

While Krishnadarshana or vision of the “Lilamaya personal-impersonality”²⁰ was for Sri Aurobindo a more integral consciousness than the impersonal Brahmadarshana, he considered Krishna-Kali-darshana to be a still higher realisation than simple Krishnadarshana:

The Krishnadarshan... often descends into the Saguna Brahman. At other times it rises to the KrishnaKali.²¹

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

7

(Mother India, March 2003)

The vision Savitri sees above her near the end of the present Book Eleven seems to be connected in its significance with her mission in the world, to which she is then returning from the spiritual heights where she has heard the voice of the Godhead. For the two sentences describing the face of a youth changing into that of a woman, which we have traced to a manuscript of 1916, are followed by three lines that give a clue to the import of this vision. The lines originally ran in the first draft:

The earth to which Savitri is guided back by these eyes is no “casual globe” in the midst of a “dead rotating universe”.² It is a centre of the Lila, the cosmic play of Spirit and Nature, the “Krishna-purusha” of the Record of Yoga and the “Kali-prakriti” through whom he expresses himself,³ their ultimate unity being symbolised here by the face seen alternately as male and female.

Savitri is “missioned” to return to the earth, and in this connection it may be relevant to observe that in the Record of Yoga the idea of a personal mission or life-work comes under the heading of karma, the divine action made possible by the union of Krishna and Kali in one’s being. Success in this mission depends especially on Kali, of whom Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Karmayogin as early as in July 1909 shortly after he was released from jail:

Kali when she enters into a man cares nothing for rationality and possibility. She is the force of Nature that whirls the stars in their orbits, lightly as a child might swing a ball, and to that force there is nothing impossible.⁴

Sri Aurobindo has mentioned that even “before he knew anything about Yoga”, he had experienced “the living presence of Kali in a shrine on the banks of the Narmada”.⁵ He had also been given a stotra of Kali by a Sannyasi, but “for political success in his mission and not for Yoga”.⁶ When he first met Sister Nivedita in Baroda in 1904, he “had read and admired her book Kali the Mother”, while she had heard of him as one who “believed in strength and was a worshipper of Kali”—by which, he explains, “she meant that she had heard of me as a revolutionary”.⁷ During this period he wrote of Mother India (Bharatamata) in the form of Kali or Chandi in poems in Bengali and Sanskrit (Jagila Janani and Bhavani Bharati).

At first, then, since Sri Aurobindo was neither religiously inclined in any conventional sense nor had entered seriously as yet the realms of spiritual experience, Kali was practically for him the goddess of revolution. This remained an aspect of his view of her even later. It was expressed in some essays he wrote after his first decisive realisations, but before he had entirely left the political field, as when he wrote early in 1910:

The action of the French Revolution was the vehement death-dance of Kali trampling blindly, furiously on the ruins She made, mad with pity for the world and therefore utterly pitiless.⁸

This “death-dance” is not the whole of Kali. But it is undoubtedly the manifestation of her that most powerfully affects our weak human sensibilities. Essentially, one might say, Kali is the Force of the Divine plunged into and re-emerging from the Inconscience and Ignorance, darkened in her apparent action by the medium through which she is seen—therefore she is known as “Kali, the dark Mother”⁹—but working to bring the world back to the Light by the most rapid and direct route and shattering unsparingly the obstacles in her way. She is the power that drives all evolution and she intervenes most visibly at the critical moments when a leap forward must be taken in the outer and inner life of humanity. According to one interpretation of her name, Kali is the Goddess of Time, the Shakti of Kala the Time-spirit, whose destructive form Krishna assumes before Arjuna’s terrified eyes on the battle-field of Kurukshetra.

Given the revolutionary nature of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga, it is only natural that, of the various names of the Goddess, “Kali” was chosen to designate the Shakti who effectuates the transformation. Her destructive aspect is merely the outward sign of her relentless push towards new creation. Commenting on one of the Thoughts and Aphorisms, the Mother brought out the essence of Sri Aurobindo’s conception of Kali:

Sri Aurobindo makes Kali the great liberating power who ardently impels you towards progress and leaves no ties within you which would hinder you from progressing.¹⁰

Early in the Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo distinguished three personalities of Kali to be harmonised in one’s nature, “bala, raudra (karali) & shiva Kali”.¹¹ The second of these is the “fierce” form corresponding to the goddess who is so graphically represented in popular Hinduism. About her black and naked image standing on Shiva’s breast, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1934:

It is Kali as a destroying Force—a symbol of the Nature Force in the ignorance surrounded by difficulties, wresting and breaking everything in a blind struggle to get through till she finds herself standing with her foot on the Divine itself—then she comes to herself and the struggle and destruction are over. That is the significance of the symbol.¹²

Sri Aurobindo was asked, “on what plane is she seen like this?” He replied, “It is in the vital.” This perhaps gives a clue to the identity of the three forms of Kali mentioned in the Record. For if her second, violent (raudra) form, also called “Karali, the terrible”,¹³ resembles that of the goddess seen on the vital plane, then bala Kali and shiva Kali may be related to the physical and mental planes below and above the vital in the ascending order of the worlds.

Shiva Kali, the benign aspect, is always present behind the violent manifestation of the goddess, for “the terrible Kali is also the loving and beneficent Mother”.¹⁴ But on the higher planes of mind, with the evolution of consciousness, the beneficent and harmonious working of Nature-Force would increasingly come into its own and Kali’s love begin to act as a purely creative power with no need for any mask of terror and destruction.

Bala Kali, on the other hand, Kali as a girl, would seem to be a symbol of Nature on the material plane in her original innocence, not yet deprived of her “early joy to live”,¹⁵ or else restored to it in a diviner sense. She is the Kali whose power we have already seen as “the force of Nature that whirls the stars in their orbits, lightly as a child might swing a ball”. In the Record of Yoga she is “Bala-Kali at play with the Bala-Krishna”.¹⁶ In Savitri, also, the two are found together as “youthful Nature and child God”.¹⁷

The three personalities of Kali can all be detected in the description of the face of the woman whom Savitri sees as she sinks through “unseen worlds”. The shiva and raudra aspects come first. They are mingled together; however, the order of the lines was revised in the second version so as to emphasise the woman’s beauty in the first three lines and reserve the words “turbulent” and “terrible” for the end of the sentence, as if corresponding to the descent from the mental plane—“the mooned night of mind” of another passage in Savitri¹⁸—to the vital. After describing the face of the youth whom we have identified as Krishna, the revised passage continues:

Finally, Savitri approaches the domain where bala Kali, as physical Nature, “whirls the stars in their orbits”. The second manuscript version of the sentence whose first draft was quoted at the beginning of this article is almost identical to the final text:

The word “dance”, introduced in the revision of the last line, is something more than a poetic metaphor. Occurring in the context of Nature’s “ecstatic life” springing from the “Spirit’s passionate content”, it implies the Lila, the play of the Spirit through its Energy which constitutes the whole phenomenon of the world:

When the Energy is absorbed in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming.²⁰

The phrase “whirling dance of earth” suggests a comparison between the orbiting of planets around the sun and the round dance of Krishna with the Gopis, the rasa lila, which is the deepest symbol of the play of divine Ananda in the relation of the One and the Many. In a poem in Bengali, Mahakala, written around the same time as the early versions of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo used the image of the earth’s dance in this way. The relevant lines may be freely rendered into English as follows:

However, the moods of this dance of the earth, expressed in the seasons, include not only the enchantment of spring but the rage of the monsoon:

This side of existence led Sri Aurobindo to see Kali as the playmate of Krishna. Yet her dance of destruction is part of the same cosmic lila, all of whose movements can be traced ultimately to “the free infinity of the self-delight of Sachchidananda”:²²

In the lila of the Eternal there are movements that are terrible as well as movements that are sweet and beautiful. The dance of Brindaban is not complete without the death-dance of Kurukshetra; for each is a part of that great harmonic movement of the world which progresses from discord to accord, from hatred and strife to love and brotherhood, from evil to the fulfilment of the evolution by the transformation of suffering and sin into beauty, bliss and good, shivam, shantam, shuddham, anandam.²³

Thus the mission for which Savitri is directed by the gaze of Krishna-Kali to rejoin the “whirling dance of earth” can only be to serve in some way the unfolding terrestrial purpose of the “Two who are One and play in many worlds”.²⁴ And since, in the last analysis, the motive and meaning of their play must lie in the delight of the play itself, their purpose in this evolving universe would be to arrive at ever higher, purer and fuller degrees of that delight:

Delight of being, Ananda, is the eternal truth of the union of this conscious being and its conscious force whether absorbed in itself or else deployed in the inseparable duality of its two aspects.... The relation in its imperfect, perverted or reverse terms is the world as we see it; but the perfect relation brings the absolute joy of the soul in itself and, based upon that, the absolute joy of the soul in Nature which is the divine fulfilment of world-existence.²⁵

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

8

(Mother India, April 2003)

During the main period of the Record of Yoga, the period up to 1920 whose later part coincided with the publication of the Arya and the beginning of the writing of Savitri, we find that Sri Aurobindo was concentrating on the sadhana he described in The Synthesis of Yoga as the “Yoga of self-perfection”. The framework of this sadhana was outlined in the sapta chatushtaya or “seven quaternaries”.¹ But all-encompassing as this Yoga seemed to be, Sri Aurobindo’s aim did not stop there. As early as 13 November 1913, he wrote prophetically in his diary:

A clear distinction must now be made between the vidya-avidya-siddhi which is constituted by the seven chatusthayas & the higher Amrita in which all limitation is removed & Death, etc entirely cease. Only the first will in this life be entirely accomplished.²

Vidya-avidya-siddhi is such perfection (siddhi) as is attainable in the “Knowledge-Ignorance” where vidya, knowledge of oneness, is subject to the conditions of avidya, the consciousness of division. At its highest, it would be the siddhi of what Sri Aurobindo later termed “Overmind”.³ A foundation for the final consummation of such a siddhi was laid on 24 November 1926 with “the descent of Krishna... the Overmind Godhead” into the physical, as Sri Aurobindo described it in 1935.⁴ This made a “vertiginous rapidity”⁵ in the completion of the sadhana of the sapta chatushtaya appear feasible, as we see in diary entries of January 1927.

But all evidence indicates that not long after this there was a change of programme. Rather than continuing along the same lines and achieving the spectacular but ultimately circumscribed and insecure results which the overmental Force could have made possible, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother—for at this stage one can no longer speak of Sri Aurobindo separately from the Mother—appear to have renounced immediate success on these lines in order to make a far more difficult attempt, with momentous implications for the future.

This was the attempt to bring down a yet higher consciousness and force, the Supermind, which could transform the Inconscient and “create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality”.⁶ The result would be to effectuate a radical change in terrestrial life and establish “the higher Amrita”, including immortality of the physical body, as an earthly possibility. Complete success might not be attainable in a single lifetime—Sri Aurobindo had foreseen this as far back as 1913—but if a decisive breakthrough could be made, its consequences might be left to be worked out in centuries to come.

1926-27 marked a transition and a turning-point. The Record of Yoga, having been interrupted since October 1920, was resumed at this time; but after a few months, it was permanently discontinued. Savitri, on the other hand, once it was likewise resumed after a similar interruption, began to assume a new importance. Perhaps this was because its story was a perfect symbol of the victory Sri Aurobindo expected to be brought within reach by the Supermind: “the higher Amrita in which all limitation is removed & Death, etc entirely cease”.

The legend of Savitri, with its vision of the Goddess and its female protagonist, also lent itself well to bringing out from the highest spiritual standpoint the role of the feminine principle in existence and especially the crucial part it must play in a supramental transformation. We have seen that up to 1920, in the earlier phase of the Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo gave the name of Kali to the universal Prakriti or Shakti, the energy of Nature or force of the Spirit, while he referred to the Purusha or Ishwara who enjoys and governs her actions as Krishna. In terms of the sapta chatushtaya, the union of Kali and Krishna in one’s being through the ecstatic surrender (madhura dasya) of Prakriti to her Lord is the basis of divine action and divine enjoyment. Sri Aurobindo was also seeing Krishna and Kali everywhere he looked in the world “outside” himself. When the Record resumes in 1926-27, however, we find no mention of Krishna or of Kali (though the reference to “tertiary dasya” on 11 January 1927⁷ is reminiscent of earlier stages of the sadhana). Rather, we glimpse a new vision of the Ishwara and Shakti which points beyond the overmental Gods and Goddesses and gives a supreme place to the divine Mother in her transcendental status as Aditi.

In a “programme” noted down at the beginning of August, 1919, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Kali to idealise and fix herself in the gnosis”.⁸ The process of “idealisation” meant lifting the movements of human nature from the mental plane into the vijnana, also called “ideality” or “gnosis”.⁹ As he explored the higher realms of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo gradually discovered level after level beyond the mind. One change he observed as he ascended was in the relation between Prakriti and Purusha in his self-experience and world-experience.

This relation has a separative and a unitive aspect, of which Sri Aurobindo wrote that the “separative aspect is liberative” and the “unitive aspect is dynamic and effective”.¹⁰ Both can be partially realised even on the mental level. But the mind, being by nature the faculty that divides and distinguishes, is more suitable as an instrument for separative knowledge. It can arrive at a separation of Purusha and Prakriti, the conscious being standing back and watching as a detached witness the unending flux of the movement of energy in himself and the world. Until then, the Purusha’s unity with Prakriti takes the form of his absorption and self-loss in her, an absorption so complete in unconscious Matter that Prakriti’s mechanical action seems sufficient to account for all phenomena. The reality of Purusha, soul or consciousness as anything more than an epiphenomenon of biochemical processes may even be doubted or dismissed as an unnecessary hypothesis by that consciousness itself in its half-wakened ignorance.

When the soul becomes dissatisfied with this state of affairs, its first need is liberation (mukti) from its subservience and imprisonment. But escape from bondage does not by itself impart an intelligible meaning to the world. It is not the separation of Purusha from Prakriti but the union of Purusha with Prakriti, recovered on a higher plane, that can fulfil the purpose of their cosmic play. Mukti is not an end in itself but a condition for siddhi, perfection. In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo explained how discovering the unitive relation between Purusha and Prakriti enables the liberated seeker

to arrive at mastery and perfection; while rejecting what is less divine or seemingly undivine in her, he can rebuild her forms and movements in himself according to a nobler pattern and the law and rhythm of a greater existence.¹¹

This can be completely done, however, only by rising beyond mind to vijnana. The separation of Purusha from Prakriti is there increasingly annulled in the consciousness and delight of their unity. This duality tends then to merge into that of Ishwara-Shakti. Sri Aurobindo explains the distinction in this way:

Ishwara is Purusha who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose presence in her movement she carries always with her.... Ishwara-Shakti stands behind the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary purpose.¹²

In the Record of Yoga, “Ishwara-Shakti” is hardly mentioned.¹³ Up to 1920, “Krishna-Kali” appears to take its place.¹⁴ Krishna and Kali are also Purusha and Prakriti—evidently in the unitive and dynamic aspect of their relation—since the terms “Krishna-purusha” and “Kali-prakriti” are found to occur.¹⁵ But the darshana (vision) of Krishna-Kali is distinguished from that of Purusha-Prakriti by the sense of “vivid personality”¹⁶ accompanying the former and by the perception in it of “the Lilamaya [enjoyer of the cosmic play] embracing & occupying all individuals”.¹⁷ Otherwise, what Sri Aurobindo says about the vision of Purusha-Prakriti can be taken to describe Krishna-Kali-darshana as well, as when he records on 9 July 1913 that

there has been enforced a more general perception of the unity of all movements of the Prakriti and of the unity of the mover of the Prakriti & their unity also with the same Purusha & Prakriti in this adhara.¹⁸

The unity that still remained to be fully realised was the unity of the Purusha with the Prakriti, of Krishna with Kali. The key to this unity could be described in the terminology of the Record as the “idealisation” of the “Kali-prakriti”. For the ascent through the planes of vijnana or ideality was a progression towards the indivisible consciousness of the Supermind or divine Gnosis. The result of this ascending movement, from the point of view of the Purusha-Prakriti relation, is described in a passage in The Synthesis of Yoga, written when Sri Aurobindo revised Part One in the early 1930s:

At a certain spiritual and supramental level the Duality becomes still more perfectly Two-in-one, the Master Soul with the Conscious Force within it, and its potentiality disowns all barriers and breaks through every limit.¹⁹

Another passage, written during the revision of the same chapter, deals with the same question as it affects the seeker who starts directly from an awareness of Ishwara and Shakti rather than from the distinction between Purusha and Prakriti. Even here there may be a separative and one-sided experience which must be reconciled in the harmony of a higher realisation:

It is when a complete union of the two sides of the Duality is effected and rules his consciousness that he begins to open to a fuller power that will draw him altogether out of the confused clash of Ideas and Forces here into a higher Truth and enable the descent of that Truth to illumine and deliver and act sovereignly upon this world of Ignorance. He has begun to lay his hand on the integral secret which in its fullness can be grasped only when he overpasses the double term that reigns here of Knowledge inextricably intertwined with an original Ignorance and crosses the border where spiritual mind disappears into supramental Gnosis.²⁰

“Knowledge inextricably intertwined with an original Ignorance” is vidya-avidya, the Knowledge-Ignorance, which extends to the Overmind. In 1927, Sri Aurobindo had reached the “border” of the supramental Gnosis and was preparing to cross over into the higher hemisphere. His diary entries at this time reflect his realisation of the “complete union of the two sides of the Duality” mentioned in The Synthesis of Yoga, the “Two-in-one” whose “potentiality disowns all barriers and breaks through every limit”. Such a power could evidently give the long-sought key to “the higher Amrita in which all limitation is removed & Death, etc entirely cease”.

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

9

(Mother India, May 2003)

The vision that in 1927 was replacing in Sri Aurobindo’s experience the Krishna-Kali-darshana of the earlier period of the Record of Yoga is referred to in two brief but highly significant entries. On 26 January, Sri Aurobindo noted:

Some modification of the universal Darshana—simultaneous vision of Parameswara-Parameswari in all.¹

A few days later, on the 1st of February, a further development was recorded. Here “Parameswara-Parameswari” was abbreviated in the cryptic style typical of the Record:

A step forward in Darshana (Aditi holding P^a-Pⁱ in all living things, less vividly in all objects). This is not yet entirely universalised but it is increasing.²

After this tantalising entry the diary breaks off until April, when there are entries for two weeks and then another gap until the last series of dated entries, those of 24-31 October. In the nine printed pages of dated Record after 1 February there are no further references to Darshana, Aditi, Parameswara or Parameswari.

But on a few pages of the notebook that contains most of the entries for 1927, Sri Aurobindo also made some diagrams related to Aditi and Parameswara-Parameswari. A somewhat freely edited version of these diagrams was first published in 1959 in The Hour of God under the editorial title “The Divine Plan”; a verbatim transcript of the manuscript is now available as part of the Record of Yoga. In the first of these diagrams, four “absolutes” are listed. The first two are designated “Tat” and “Sat”. These are defined as the “Absolute Transcendent” and the “supreme self-contained absolute Existence”. The third is Aditi, “the indivisible consciousness force and Ananda of the Supreme”, also called Adya-Shakti. The fourth absolute is represented by the equation “Parameswara of the Gita = Parameswari of the Tantra”.³

Parameswara is the Supreme Lord. Parameswari is the feminine form of the same word, not literally translatable into English. The equation of these two would represent the “complete union of the two sides of the Duality”,⁴ the perfect “Two-in-one” referred to in The Synthesis of Yoga as realisable at “a certain spiritual and supramental level”.⁵ Aditi or Adya-Shakti (the “original Power” mentioned in Savitri)⁶ who stands above them is the “transcendent Mother”⁷ about whom Sri Aurobindo wrote in his book The Mother in 1927.⁸ Sometime after that, clarifying some terms in The Mother, he explained about the transcendent Mother:

This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her—the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.⁹

The “supramental Ishwara” corresponds evidently to “Parameswara” in the Record of Yoga, who is inseparable from “Parameswari”. In this light, we may take the latter to be for Sri Aurobindo at this stage in his Yoga the same as the “supramental Mahashakti”,¹⁰ the supreme form of the universal Mother. Corresponding to the vision of Aditi holding P^a-Pⁱ we read in The Mother that the Supreme is manifested as Ishwara-Shakti through the original (adya) transcendent Shakti:

The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine.... The Supreme is manifest in her for ever as the everlasting Sachchidananda, manifested through her in the worlds as the one and dual consciousness of Ishwara-Shakti and the dual principle of Purusha-Prakriti....¹¹

Some ten years after this was published, Sri Aurobindo began to introduce into Savitri a vision related to what he had recorded in his diary and elaborated on in diagrams and in The Mother. It is here that we find the full revelation of what lay behind the almost algebraic notations in the Record of Yoga, whose brevity should not mislead us into underestimating the significance of the experiences recorded. From the late 1920s onwards, Savitri gradually became Sri Aurobindo’s chosen vehicle for giving a poetic account of his inner life. But its revision and immense expansion during this period consisted largely of the incorporation of experiences he had had many years earlier. Some of these had been noted in the Record of Yoga at the time. The present instance is a case in point, which will serve as an example for the purpose of this series of articles before returning to the story of how the later books of the epic were revised in the 1940s.

The passage in question comes just before Aswapati, ascending through the worlds, reaches the overmental planes which in the final text of Savitri are described in “The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge” (Book Two, Canto Fifteen). In the late 1930s, there was not yet a separate Book of the Traveller of the Worlds. But the fourth section of the first book, referred to in Sri Aurobindo’s letters as “the Worlds”, had already become the longest section and was rapidly growing. Passages that would develop into each of the cantos of Book Two were taking shape. The last five of these cantos deal with the planes of consciousness that bridge the enormous gulf between mind and Supermind. Thus they are of the utmost importance for the symbolisation in Savitri of the transformation envisaged in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. Yet their place in the scheme of Part One is not immediately obvious because Sri Aurobindo does not, except at the end with the word “Overmind”, employ here the terms used in his prose accounts of the same subject. Moreover, he introduces details whose explanation cannot easily be found in other writings of his. A brief look at what precedes the tremendous vision now found at the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen is therefore necessary if we wish to have some idea of why this vision comes where it does and what it signifies from the point of view of the development of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experience.

Aswapati’s ascension through the planes of the spiritual mind begins with a “triple realm of ordered thought”¹² which in the finished poem is described in “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind” (Book Two, Canto Eleven). From all that is said in Savitri about this realm whose “deities shape our greater thinking’s roads”,¹³ we can gather that it corresponds to what in other writings of the 1930s and ’40s Sri Aurobindo termed the “Higher Mind”. In one of the chapters he added to The Life Divine when he revised the Arya text for the first edition, published in 1939-40, he defined this Higher Mind as “a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge”.¹⁴ Here he also applied to it the expression “greater mind” used in Savitri:

An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. This kind of cognition is the last that emerges from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit: it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our mentality should, when it goes beyond itself, pass into its immediate source.¹⁵

In this and other passages where Sri Aurobindo explains the nature of the Higher Mind, there seems at first sight to be no suggestion of the three levels described in Savitri. But on a careful reading of the first sentence quoted above, we notice that three movements can be distinguished: first, a transmission of truths from the original identity; second, a conceiving of the multiplicity of possible ramifications of these truths; third, an effective formulation and realisation of these conceptions. In Book Two, Canto Eleven of Savitri, where the kingdoms of the greater mind appear in ascending order, the last of these functions belongs to the “Masters of things actual”, who “give a mould” to “all that Spirit conceives”. The second function is carried out by the “architects of possibility”, to whose vision the “invisible multitude” of cosmic forces is unveiled. The first is the prerogative of the “sovereign Kings of Thought” who, acting as “Intercessors with a luminous Unseen”, convey to the world the “imperatives of the creator Self”.¹⁶

In the Record of Yoga, in the entry of 19 October 1920, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a “logos vijnana”¹⁷ which “has to deal with three movements”:

1. Actualities—representative
2. Potentialities (including and harmonising with the actualities, or separate.)
3. The imperatives of the infinite—absolute, imperative, identific.¹⁸

The term logos vijnana also occurs in a chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga published in the Arya on 15 October 1920, in the same month as the above entry in the Record. At that time, Sri Aurobindo had not clearly distinguished all the planes between mind and Supermind or adopted the terms “Higher Mind, “Illumined Mind”, “Intuition” and “Overmind” to designate these planes.¹⁹ Those who read the last chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga without knowing this are likely to be perplexed, especially if they are unaware that Part Four of the book was never revised and updated in its terminology as Parts One and Two were in the 1930s and ’40s. On the other hand, once the terminology is understood, these chapters are found to contain a detailed account of certain stages of the ascent into higher planes of consciousness for which the Record of Yoga is the only other available source.

Keeping in mind that the word “supramental” in unrevised texts from the Arya may indicate simply the supra-intellectual and need not mean what is above the Overmind—a term that had not yet been coined—we see that in the passage mentioning “logos Vijnana” in The Synthesis of Yoga, this expression can be understood to refer to what Sri Aurobindo later called the Higher Mind. For the “higher buddhi” with which it is identified, termed the “supramental reason” (elsewhere the spiritual or divine reason), is the first faculty we meet when we rise above the limitations of the intellect and the intuitive mind:²⁰

The first well-organised action of the supermind in the ascending order is the supramental reason, not a higher logical intellect, but a directly luminous organisation of intimately subjective and intimately objective knowledge, the higher buddhi, the logical or rather the logos Vijnana. The supramental reason does all the work of the reasoning intelligence and does much more, but with a greater power and in a different fashion.²¹

In the preceding chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, this first faculty of the higher knowledge was said to have three levels, mentioned here in descending order:

The supramental thought... has three elevations of its intensity, one of direct thought vision, another of interpretative vision pointing to and preparing the greater revelatory idea-sight, a third of representative vision recalling as it were to the spirit’s knowledge the truth that is called out more directly by the higher powers.²²

The “representative vision” which is the least direct of these modes of knowledge is, as the word “recalling” suggests, related to the faculty of smriti. This means literally the “remembering” of the truth. Smriti included for Sri Aurobindo a suggestive and a discriminative working of intuition:²³

The suggestive intuition acting on the mental level suggests a direct and illumining inner idea of the truth, an idea that is its true image and index, not as yet the entirely present and whole sight, but rather of the nature of a bright memory of some truth, a recognition of a secret of the self’s knowledge. It is a representation, but a living representation, not an ideative symbol, a reflection, but a reflection that is lit up with something of the truth’s real substance. The intuitive discrimination is a secondary action setting this idea of the truth in its right place and its relation to other ideas.²⁴

In the entry on “logos vijnana” in the Record of Yoga, we have seen that the word “representative” is associated with “actualities”. This association is also found in The Synthesis of Yoga, where Sri Aurobindo observes with regard to the “representative action” of the spiritual reason that it “formulates to us mainly the actualities of the existence of the self in and around us”.²⁵

On a higher scale, there is an “interpretative action” of this faculty which is “less insistent on actualities” and “opens out yet greater potentialities in time and space and beyond”.²⁶ In Sri Aurobindo’s experience this was related to inspiration, a means of knowledge whose nature is best evoked by the Sanskrit word shruti, literally the “hearing” of the truth. Thus, he speaks of “an inspiration or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities not less true than actual or realised things”.²⁷

Finally, the “direct thought vision” characteristic of the highest elevation of the first plane of vijnana is evidently a manifestation of the faculty of drishti or revelation, the “sight” of the truth, by which its very face and body, as it were, become immediately present to the consciousness. This is described in The Synthesis of Yoga as a “revealingly imperative power of the spirit’s knowledge by identity”.²⁸

After listing the three elevations of this higher thought-plane and noting the relation of the “representative vision” to the suggestive and discriminating intuition, of the “interpretative vision” to the faculty of inspiration and of the “direct thought vision” to the revelatory power, Sri Aurobindo goes on to observe that even this distinction between three levels is, in practice, an oversimplification. For in the actual process of the sadhana,

as we ascend, the lower first calls down into itself and is then taken up into the higher, so that on each level all the three elevations are reproduced, but always there predominates in the thought essence the character that belongs to that level’s proper form of consciousness....²⁹

This explains the rationale of the remarkably complex terminology used in the Record of Yoga in 1918-20 for the numerous gradations of what Sri Aurobindo was then referring to as “logistic vijnana”, “logistic ideality” or “logistis”. “Logos vijnana” was introduced only at the end of this period and was applied both to the highest level and to the whole of a simplified but less symmetrical system of the gradations of the first plane of vijnana. In the light of the scheme in which all three elevations are repeated on each of the three levels, we can perhaps glimpse what Sri Aurobindo might have meant when he dictated in the 1940s a line near the beginning of the first paragraph about the “triple realm” in Book Two, Canto Eleven of Savitri:

A possible explanation of this “triple flight” is that the first flight of steps consists of the intuitive logistic vijnana of the Record of Yoga in its three forms, uninspired, inspired and revelatory.³¹ The second flight is formed, similarly, by the intuitional inspired, pure inspirational and revelatory inspired logistis.³² The third flight would begin with what Sri Aurobindo referred to as “the intuitive, inspired and revelatory forms of the intuitive revelation” constituting the “lowest scale” of the “tertiary logistis”.³³ Then comes a similar series on the next scale, that of the “inspired revelatory logistis”.³⁴

This leads, finally, to the “full revelatory in the three orders”,³⁵ which may be identified with “logos vijnana” in the higher sense, also called the “drashta logos”.³⁶ Since this in its dealing with actualities, potentialities and imperatives is the definitive expression of the “luminous reason”,³⁷ it is likely to be what Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote of this plane in Savitri, regarded as the “triple world” of the godheads of the greater or higher mind, viewing the lower gradations as if they were a long stairway forming a “triple flight” to reach it.

The first known draft of the passage that developed into “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind” was written in 1937-38, nearly twenty years after Sri Aurobindo had recorded his experiences of this plane in his Yogic diary. Already, the key words “actual”, “potencies” and “imperative” occur at the beginnings of the descriptions of the godheads of the three levels. The passage concerned with these godheads begins in this draft, transcribing it here as it was first written before revision:

Above these appeared a “subtler archangel race”, about whom Sri Aurobindo wrote in the first version (using the word “potencies” in place of the “potentialities” mentioned in the Record of Yoga):

On this level, she who has been all along “the invisible Magnet” drawing Aswapati towards the heights is perceived behind her workings. Here, however, she is seen in an abstract form which may be satisfying to the intelligence, but is not enough for the soul:

The ascent continues. At last the summit of this luminous thought-world is reached:

In the final text of Savitri, these “imperative Vasts” have been replaced by the “imperatives of the creator Self”. Here we can see even more clearly the parallel with Sri Aurobindo’s diary entry of 1920, where the “logos vijnana” in its highest action deals with the “imperatives of the infinite—absolute, imperative, identific”:

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

10

(Mother India, June 2003)

After “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind”, the next step in Aswapati’s climbing of the world-stair brings him to “The Heavens of the Ideal” described in Book Two, Canto Twelve of Savitri. If the “Greater Mind” of Canto Eleven is what Sri Aurobindo usually termed “Higher Mind”, to what plane or planes do these heavens belong?

On the first page of the canto they are called the “heavens of the ideal Mind”.¹ “Ideal Mind” is also mentioned in a line in the previous canto, which speaks of the “splendours of ideal Mind”.² When he introduced “ideal Mind” into Savitri in the late 1930s in these two lines, Sri Aurobindo was reviving this expression from a terminology he had seldom used in his writings since 1914‑20. In the Record of Yoga during that period, though “ideal mind” itself occurs only a few times, it is evidently equivalent to “ideality” which occurs several hundred times as an English substitute for the still more frequently occurring term “vijnana”.³ It is applied to a consciousness higher than the intellectual or even the intuitive mind, as in an entry on 12 June 1914:

The attempt to carry the ritam farther is for the present entirely baffled by the forces that seek to remain in the intuitive reason & develop it to the exclusion of the descending Ideal Mind.⁴

In works that appeared in the Arya, also, “ideal mind” occurs occasionally in a sense similar to its meaning in the Record, as in this passage in a chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga published in February 1917 and slightly revised by Sri Aurobindo in his own copy of the Arya:

The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may describe in our modern turn of language as the Truth‑plane or the ideal mind or supermind. There the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge.⁵

This statement, according to which “ideal mind” would seem to be the same as “supermind”, tells us about the essential nature of vijnana and what all its planes have in common; it does not make the distinctions between various planes which became increasingly important for Sri Aurobindo as he advanced on the path and the aim of his Yoga widened from self-perfection to earth-transformation. These distinctions between planes, unnecessary for achieving the inner liberation which was long considered the only true goal of spirituality, were gradually discovered by Sri Aurobindo to be indispensable for the purpose of a Yoga that contemplates a radical and integral change of our nature. The reason becomes apparent from his explanation, in one of his letters, of how the higher planes differ from the lower ones:

The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all the planes from the Higher Mind upwards on which the realisation of the One is the natural basis of consciousness. But as one goes upward, the view changes, the power of consciousness changes, the Light becomes ever more intense and potent. Although the static realisation of Infinity and Eternity and the Timeless One remains the same, the vision of the workings of the One becomes ever wider and is attended with a greater instrumentality of Force....⁶

Such a “greater instrumentality of Force” is necessary for the integral Yoga because of the resistance of the established nature of this world, rooted as it is in the primeval Inconscient. For even after the individual being in all its parts has undergone the beginnings of a psycho-spiritual conversion and transformation,

the original basis of Nescience proper to the Inconscient will still be there needing at every turn to be changed, enlightened, diminished in its extent and in its force of reaction.

In this passage in “The Ascent towards Supermind”—a chapter Sri Aurobindo added to The Life Divine when he revised it for publication in 1939-40—he went on to indicate the limitations of the Higher Mind from this point of view:

The power of the spiritual Higher Mind and its idea‑force, modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into our mentality, is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create the gnostic being, but it can make a first change, a modification that will capacitate a higher ascent and a more powerful descent and further prepare an integration of the being in a greater Force of consciousness and knowledge.⁷

In the Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1919 of “a higher than the logistic ideality”, characterised by “a diviner splendour of light and blaze of fiery effulgence”.⁸ Initially he referred to it as the “hermetic ideality”, “hermetic gnosis” or “hermetic vijnana”, shortening these sometimes to “hermesis”.⁹ In 1920 he adopted the term “srauta vijnana” formed from the word for inspired knowledge, shruti.¹⁰ The differences between the “logistic” and “hermetic” planes of vijnana as presented in the Record of Yoga resemble those between the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind in the terminology Sri Aurobindo settled upon by the early 1930s and used consistently in his later prose writings, including his letters and the revised or added chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine.

The passage quoted above from The Life Divine goes on to identify the “greater Force of consciousness” for which the action of the Higher Mind can prepare us:

This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil day‑light, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual‑spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge.¹¹

The depiction of the “heavens of the ideal Mind” in Book Two, Canto Twelve of Savitri suggests that Sri Aurobindo’s intention there was to portray this Illumined Mind, both on its own plane and in the effects of its descent into the human consciousness. Though, as we have seen, “ideal Mind” by itself according to his earlier use of that expression might mean any supra-intellectual plane, what he says about these “heavens” seems to agree specifically with his definition of the Illumined Mind.

The identity of the plane of consciousness represented in this canto is revealed most clearly by a line in its concluding paragraph:

We have seen that “an intense lustre” distinguishes the Illumined Mind from the Higher Mind’s “clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil day‑light”. But if its light is intense in comparison with what is below it, the word “partial” is justified when this light is compared with that of the planes above it. Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter that the light of knowledge is

still rather diluted and diffused in the illumined mind; it becomes more and more intense, clearly defined and dynamic and effective on the higher planes so much so as to change always the character and power of the knowledge.¹³

Most of the canto entitled “The Heavens of the Ideal” is devoted to descriptions of two contrasting series of worlds: the “lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose” and the “mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame”.¹⁴ Here the Rose and Flame seem to symbolise, respectively, the “rapturous ecstasy of knowledge” and “fiery ardour of realisation” mentioned in The Life Divine as attributes of the Illumined Mind. This consciousness, when it descends into us, brings a “seeing and seizing power” which “can effect a more powerful and dynamic integration” of the mental, emotional, vital, sensational and physical nature than the Higher Mind:

it illumines the thought‑mind with a direct inner vision and inspiration, brings a spiritual sight into the heart and a spiritual light and energy into its feeling and emotion, imparts to the life‑force a spiritual urge, a truth inspiration that dynamises the action and exalts the life movements; it infuses into the sense a direct and total power of spiritual sensation so that our vital and physical being can contact and meet concretely, quite as intensely as the mind and emotion can conceive and perceive and feel, the Divine in all things; it throws on the physical mind a transforming light that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought‑power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body.¹⁵

Many of these effects of the working of the Illumined Mind can be detected in the description in Savitri of what happens when the “bud” of the deathless Rose “is born in human breasts”, translating into human experience something of the “rapt idealism of heavenly sense”¹⁶ native to those higher realms where the Rose of God blooms eternally:

It is a predictable result of the action of such a faculty that “it illumines the thought‑mind with a direct inner vision”. But Sri Aurobindo has added that it even “pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body”. This, too, is depicted in the same passage in Savitri:

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

11

(Mother India, July 2003)

In “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind” and “The Heavens of the Ideal”, Cantos Eleven and Twelve of Book Two of Savitri, we have found a poetic revelation of the planes of consciousness to which, in the 1930s and ’40s, Sri Aurobindo usually gave the names Higher Mind and Illumined Mind. If this is correct, we might expect these two cantos to be followed by one or more dealing with the next level in the hierarchy, Intuition. In view of Sri Aurobindo’s insistence on the importance of the Intuition, in the special sense in which he used the word, this plane could hardly be bypassed in Aswapati’s ascent towards the Overmind, explicitly mentioned in “The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge” (Book Two, Canto Fifteen).¹ Sri Aurobindo explained in a letter:

The Intuition is the first plane in which there is a real opening to the full possibility of realisation—it is through it that one goes farther—first to overmind and then to supermind.²

But Cantos Thirteen and Fourteen of Book Two, “In the Self of Mind” and “The World‑Soul”, seem to depart somewhat from a straightforward presentation of the higher planes in logical sequence. For Savitri is not a philosophical treatise, it is an epic of the spirit. Aswapati, the “traveller of the worlds”, does not strictly follow at every step the “map” to which Sri Aurobindo compared his systematic description in The Life Divine of the progression from Higher Mind through Illumined Mind and Intuition to Overmind and Supermind. After completing his treatment of this subject in the chapter “The Ascent towards Supermind”, he added:

This or something more largely planned on these lines might be regarded as the schematic, logical or ideal account of the spiritual transformation, a structural map of the ascent to the supramental summit, looked at as a succession of separate steps, each accomplished before the passage to the next commences. It would be as if the soul, putting forth an organised natural individuality, were a traveller mounting the degrees of consciousness cut out in universal Nature, each ascent carrying it totally as a definite integer, as a separate body of conscious being, from one state of its existence to the next in order.... But evolutionary Nature is not a logical series of separate segments....³

When we read the Record of Yoga we discover that even for Sri Aurobindo, the actual process of sadhana was much more complex than a schematic account of its steps would suggest. The presentation of his experiences in Savitri shares this complexity to some extent, although in “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” the image of the soul as “a traveller mounting the degrees of consciousness cut out in universal Nature” has been adopted. The two cantos following “The Heavens of the Ideal” exemplify the difference between the logical organisation of a book like The Life Divine and the more experiential structure of Savitri. The working of the Intuition is represented, as we will see, by two contrasting experiences: the “luminous finger” in Canto Thirteen and, at the end of the next canto, the vision of the “Two‑in‑One” with the “sole omnipotent Goddess” standing behind them. The relation of these experiences to the passages about the Self of Mind and the World‑Soul, from which the cantos derive their titles, calls for some explanation.

As Aswapati moves through the heavenly realms whose emblems are the Rose and the Flame (Book Two, Canto Twelve), he does not find any supreme epiphany of knowledge, power or bliss such as would induce him to stay for long “beneath their splendour’s rule”.⁴ Each of these kingdoms, whatever claim might be made for the absoluteness of its particular truth, is evidently the “perfect home”⁵ of only a single ideal. Continuing his search, he passes on until he becomes aware of and grows one with “an enormous Self of Mind”

The liberating experience of this limitless Self which contains all beings (sarvani bhutani atmani, in the phrase of the Isha Upanishad),⁷ yet whose “mighty calm” is undisturbed by all it holds, gives the compelling sense of a definitive realisation:

According to the tradition of centuries of quietistic and ascetic spirituality in India, the silence of the Atman or Brahman is the door of exit from the world and its insoluble problems. But the discovery of the Self can also have a different outcome, as is suggested in this passage. Aswapati not only finds peace; he comes to know the “cosmic Whole”. He becomes not only free, but powerful:

The emphasis here is on the peace and freedom this realisation brings, but the knowledge and power that could result from such an immense expansion of the consciousness are also evident. There is nothing in this description that contradicts the dynamic aim of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga as formulated in his diary as early as 1912:

It has been seen that in repose, in nivritti [inactivity], in udasinata [indifference], perfect peace and ananda are possible; but the thing the Yoga has set out to establish is the perfect harmony of Nivritti & Pravritti [activity],... complete Ananda, Tapas, Knowledge, Love, Power & Infinite Ego-less Being, consummating in the full and vehement flow of the Pravritti. By the fulfilment or failure of this harmony the Yoga stands or falls.¹⁰

The positive and negative elements of this harmony are equally necessary, for it is neither a contemplative withdrawal nor a restless slavery to the compulsion to act that is envisaged as the ideal. The silence of the Atman, Nirguna Brahman or witness Purusha is the indispensable basis and provides an unshakable foundation of Nivritti or inner immobility with which the Pravritti, the unrestricted flow of activity, has to be perfectly harmonised. This fundamental realisation is described at the beginning of Book Two, Canto Thirteen of Savitri. Here the Divine is realised not as the supreme Ishwara, but as the “witness Lord”.¹¹ This expression, puzzling at first sight—since a witness simply watches and seems to exercise no lordship—can be understood in terms of the prabhu and vibhu or “presiding and all‑pervading Impersonality”¹² of the Gita, the prabhu aspect “by its presence authorising the works of Nature”, the vibhu “by its all‑pervading existence supporting and consenting to them”.¹³ In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo explained this status of the Lord:

As the one silent self of all he is the non‑doer, and Nature alone is the doer. He leaves all these works to be done by her according to the law of our being, svabhavas tu pravartate, and yet he is still the lord, prabhu vibhu, because he views and upholds our action and enables Nature to work by his silent sanction. He by his immobility transmits the power of the supreme Godhead through the compulsion of his pervading motionless Presence and supports its workings by the equal regard of his witness Self in all things.¹⁴

Delivered from the delusions of the ignorant mind and identified inwardly with this immutable Self or Akshara Brahman, aware of the world’s forces and its “motive thoughts”¹⁵ as movements in his own being, Aswapati has reached a state of consciousness where he is a silent channel for the action of the Almighty. This is described in terms reminiscent of the Gita’s kritsnavid or “knower of the whole”, about whom Sri Aurobindo wrote:

The liberated man has the complete and total knowledge, kritsnavid, and does all works without any of the restrictions made by the mind, kritsna‑karma‑krit, according to the force and freedom and infinite power of the divine will within him.¹⁶

But what appears on one plane of consciousness to be an integral knowledge may turn out to be incomplete when it is regarded from a higher plane. Aswapati’s sense of knowing the “cosmic Whole” is shattered, not by an upsurge of darkness from below, but by the touch of a more penetrating light from above:

Not only his perception of the phenomenal universe, but even his experience of the Self is thrown into doubt:

The earliest version of this passage, written in the late 1930s, provides some clues to Sri Aurobindo’s intention in introducing the “luminous finger” or “sceptic Ray” to disturb the apparent finality of a great and necessary realisation. As first written in that manuscript, before it was revised, the passage began:

The phrases “new liberation” and “deeper Ray” in the first two lines of this draft of the passage show that this “finger” is the projection of a consciousness that is pointing Aswapati towards a yet unreached height or depth of being. Yet its first effect is to break down the harmony of the state he has already attained and lead him paradoxically to a sense not of liberation, but of imprisonment, as we see at the end of this paragraph of the draft:

In later revision the “deeper Ray” became a “sceptic Ray” and the phrase about a “new liberation” was dropped. Along with many newly added lines, these changes emphasised the aspect of crisis, of relapse from the siddhi (spiritual perfection or realisation) that had been achieved by identification with the Self into a state perceived as one of asiddhi (imperfection) and ashraddha (doubt). But the crisis remains in the final version what it had clearly been from the beginning, a means of passing on towards a higher siddhi and a more perfect knowledge:

In Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga, we see repeatedly that this was in his experience the underlying nature of all attacks of what he called “Asiddhi”—as, for example, when he wrote: “The Asiddhi has once again shown itself a means of siddhi.”²¹ And again, “overt Asiddhi is always veiled Siddhi” and “the larger Siddhi prepares by means of the Asiddhi”.²²

What Aswapati had realised as the Self was evidently not the supreme Self or Paramatman in its ultimate reality as it is known by the “self‑vision of Eternity”, but a reflection of it on some mental plane. Sri Aurobindo has called this reflected experience the “Self of Mind”. But we have seen that Aswapati had already gone far beyond the range of the ordinary human intelligence, passing through various regions of the planes Sri Aurobindo elsewhere termed Higher Mind and Illumined Mind. Since he reaches the “Self of Mind” after a further ascent, the plane of Mind on which he has this experience of the Self can hardly be anything lower than the Illumined Mind at the summit of at least its intermediate level (perhaps the “middle hermesis” of the Record of Yoga),²³ before it begins to be raised beyond itself by flashes of a higher Intuition.

This interpretation of the “Self of Mind” is consistent with Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, where the expressions Higher Mind and Illumined Mind themselves show that these planes—though they are above mind in the normal sense—still have an essentially mental character when compared with planes that have a more direct contact with the supramental Truth. The Intuition is the first of those higher planes and therefore the line between Illumined Mind and Intuition marks a crucial transition. In a passage in The Synthesis of Yoga written in the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo observed that the mind “in the process of spiritualisation”

will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind, and next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free Intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental.... Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self‑awareness of essential Being....²⁴

The “radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself” seem to be represented in Book Two, Canto Thirteen of Savitri by the falling of the “luminous finger” which exposes the fundamental defect of all mental consciousness, its separative basis and its consequent inability to know by identity. That this finger is an apt symbol of Intuition touching the plane below it will become apparent from a glance at Sri Aurobindo’s explanation of exactly what he meant by Intuition. He wrote in The Life Divine, comparing this faculty with the Higher and Illumined Mind:

Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity.... This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence.²⁵

In Savitri, this “penetrating and revealing touch” is concretised as a finger not only in Book Two, Canto Thirteen, where it falls on the constructions of the mind with devastating effect, but in Book One, Canto Three, where it is lifted towards the heights in an equally abrupt and dramatic gesture:

The “luminous finger” in the canto about the Self of Mind becomes in the next sentence the “sceptic Ray” which disrupts “all that seems”.²⁷ A little later, the “builder Reason” is said to be

“Ray” and “edge” are words that occur elsewhere in Sri Aurobindo’s writings to evoke the nature of Intuition. They come together in a sentence in The Life Divine:

Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far‑off supermind light....²⁹

The association of “edge” and “point” with Intuition is likewise seen in one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters:

In the Intuition the nature of Knowledge is Truth not global or whole, but coming out in so many points, edges, flashes of a Truth that is behind it and supplies it with its direct perceptions.³⁰

In Savitri itself—in the passage in Book Ten, Canto Four where Sri Aurobindo explicitly speaks of “Intuition” as the highest of the planes below the Overmind and Supermind—he uses, besides the expression “intuitive Ray”,³¹ exactly the same words “edge” and “point”:

The “luminous finger” or “sceptic Ray” acts in much the same manner as this “spear-point ictus”, probing beneath appearances to uncover the “secret soul” of things, which Aswapati finds in the fourteenth canto of Book Two. Most of the thirteenth canto is concerned not with that positive discovery, however, but with the preliminary work of demolition of all mental constructions. This work is done by the “edge of the convicting beam”, assailing the façade of the universe as it is presented to us by the mind even at its most illumined. For the liberating separation of Purusha from Prakriti, of conscious being from the mechanism of Nature, leaves the instruments of our knowledge of the world and our means of acting on it, however heightened and enlarged, still subject to the law of the original Ignorance, the cosmic Avidya that arose when all-dividing Mind divided itself from Supermind. A radical transformation of our faculties is needed, without which

knowledge would still remain a working of the mind, liberated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be, comparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence of its dynamism; it would reflect luminously great constructions of Truth, but not move in the domain where Truth is authentic, direct, sovereign and native.³³

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

12

(Mother India, August 2003)

In the second book of Savitri, as Sri Aurobindo once explained, Aswapati ascends through the worlds “as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness”.¹ In Book Two, Canto Thirteen, he has realised in this way the universal Self as the impassive witness of the action of cosmic Nature. This is depicted as a state of freedom, knowledge and a kind of impersonal power attained on a high and illumined level of spiritual mind—whence the canto’s title, “In the Self of Mind”.² A similar condition of cosmic consciousness is described in many places in Sri Aurobindo’s writings, as in this sentence in The Synthesis of Yoga:

Absolved in the cosmic wideness, released from ego, his personality reduced to a point of working of the universal Force, himself calm, liberated, deathless in universality, motionless in the Witness Self even while outspread without limit in unending Space and Time, he can enjoy in the world the freedom of the Timeless.³

Yet this great realisation is, in Sri Aurobindo’s view, not enough for the integral Yoga. He went on to point out its limitations:

In the cosmic consciousness there remains at the end a hiatus, an unequal equation of a highest Knowledge that can liberate but not effectuate with a Power seeming to use a limited Knowledge or masking itself with a surface Ignorance that can create but creates imperfection or a perfection transient, limited and in fetters. On one side there is a free undynamic Witness and on the other side a bound Executrix of action who has not been given all the means of action.⁴

This is the central problem that Sri Aurobindo set out to solve in practical terms in his Yoga. Spirituality has long been content with a “Knowledge that can liberate but not effectuate”—or else, if it concerned itself with effectuation, as in Tantra, it has tended to lose sight of the highest knowledge. We have seen that the thing Sri Aurobindo intended to establish, as he wrote in the Record of Yoga, was “the perfect harmony of Nivritti & Pravritti”,⁵ of peace and equality (shanti, samata) with force and effectuating power (shakti, tapas). He discovered gradually that it was necessary for this purpose to rise to higher and higher planes of a supra-intellectual consciousness, vijnana. He wrote in his diary on 24 June 1914:

The vijnana of Knowledge & Power is the crux. So long as it is not entirely justified, the perfect finality of Samata & Shakti in the adhar & its environment is not possible. For Error & Defect mean persistence of the vrana [wound] in the active Brahman & where there is a wound there will be suffering. The only other escape is into the shantam Brahma in Mind where activity ceases in a silent & impartial Delight that does not fulfil, but only escapes from the necessity of harmony. It is only in the ritam that the Shantam becomes the Active & Nivritti & Pravritti are perfectly reconciled.⁶

Ritam, “ordered truth of active being”, spontaneously emerging out of Satyam, “static truth of essential being”,⁷ in the Brihat or vast self-extension of the Brahman: this is the inalienable law of things only in the supramental Truth-consciousness, according to Sri Aurobindo’s experience. It is here that “the Shantam [Silent Brahman] becomes the Active [Brahman] & Nivritti & Pravritti are perfectly reconciled”. This plane is reached in Book Three, Canto Three of Savitri, “The House of the Spirit and the New Creation”:⁸

But Aswapati has still to pass through several intermediate stages before he will arrive at “this vast outbreak of perfection’s law”¹⁰ (brihad ritam). Meanwhile, he is prevented from lingering too long in a lesser realisation. The falling of the “luminous finger” has shown his experience of the witness Self to be a “part-experience” which “fragmented the Whole”.¹¹ This defect inherent in the very nature of mind has vitiated Indian spiritual seeking for centuries, according to Sri Aurobindo. In an early draft of this passage, written in the late 1930s, he spoke of a “contradiction” that “cut in two the One Reality”. Transcribed as it was first written in that manuscript, before being revised, the sentence in question reads:¹²

Sri Aurobindo’s solution to the “huge dilemma” was presented briefly in the sequel to this passage and elaborated in subsequent versions which turned into Book Two, Canto Fourteen, “The World-Soul”. This solution has two parts. The first involves not an ascent to a higher plane than the one Aswapati has already reached, but a movement inward to discover a deeper truth behind the world itself and its appearance of a “cosmic bondage”. He is led to find another principle concealed by the imprisoned or self-imprisoning mind, an ensouling entity described in the same manuscript as

The presence of this potentially divinising entity in embodied beings gives rise to the possibility of a transformation of the works of the creative Power (Prakriti). She may then be revealed as a mask of the “nameless Force”, whose “fathomless rapture” does not abrogate the immobile peace of the Self. The vision of this rapturous Force, seen as One at whose feet Aswapati surrenders himself, foreshadows “The Book of the Divine Mother” and suggests the second part of the solution of the world-problem. At the same time, in the scheme of “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”, this stunning flash of revelatory experience represents the plane of Intuition, through which Aswapati passes on to Overmind in the last canto of Book Two.

The Intuition, as we have seen, has already intervened as the “luminous finger” falling from above on the plane below it. Now it seems to change into a “beckoning finger”, summoning the traveller of the worlds into another dimension:

The words “joy”, “bliss”, “ecstasy” and “passion” in this sentence all indicate the essential nature of the soul hidden deep within ourselves and the world. This is the part of us whose origin is the principle of Ananda or infinite Bliss and which is always attracted towards its pure divine source as if it were drawn by an invisible magnet. Sri Aurobindo wrote with regard to this part of our being that it is

in a special sense the soul,—that is to say, the psychic principle which is not the life or the mind, much less the body, but which holds in itself the opening and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight of self, to light, to love, to joy and beauty and to a refined purity of being.¹⁵

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

13

(Mother India, September 2003)

In Book Two, Canto Fourteen of Savitri, Aswapati is led into the world-soul or psychic realm “by a mysterious sound” which at times resembles one physical sound or another, yet is no sound in particular:

In the earliest known draft of this passage, the specific sounds Aswapati seemed to hear were those of a flute, a cricket, thunder and the sea, mentioned in one line each. Several other sounds were eventually introduced (though thunder was omitted), the description of them was elaborated and the passage grew to half a page. The first to be added were the sounds of anklet bells and bees, and we find the following early version of the passage in a notebook where a draft of the canto now called “The World-Soul” was written under the heading “The Psychic World”:²

In the Record of Yoga, some of these sounds are referred to where Sri Aurobindo speaks of the development of the faculty of subtle hearing, sravana or sukshma shabdadrishti, forming part of the more general faculty of vishayadrishti or subtle sense-perception. At the beginning of August 1919, he wrote in his diary:

Sravana comes with strength or persistence only in the old symbolic sounds, cricket, ticking, bells, thunder etc....³

Some of these “old symbolic sounds” had been listed a few years earlier in the entry of 29 June 1914. There, “flute, bells, cricket” were included among the “typical sounds” which, it was noted, had for some days been

loud, constant & uninterrupted for minutes together in the closed ear. Today they achieved the same manifestation to the open ear.⁴

Elsewhere the flute is mentioned among certain “symbol shabdas”.⁵ In his letters in the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo also made a distinction between “symbol sounds... which have a connection with the sadhana” and sounds that are “merely the sounds of the other planes”.⁶ The symbolic sounds connected with sadhana seem to be those “like the sound of bells, crickets, etc.” which are not only “signs of the opening of the inner consciousness”, but “seem even to help the opening.⁷

In Savitri, Aswapati is led by these sounds not merely into an inner consciousness, but into the inmost depths of the soul. In its origin, the mysterious sound he hears as this multitudinous murmur is evidently the anahata shabda or “unstruck sound”, always welling from the rapturous heart of things, which gives its name to the anahata chakra, the emotional centre in the subtle body with the psychic being behind it. For if a formless spirit has become the soul of form,⁸ a silent spirit must likewise have become the soul of sound. In a state of profound awareness, all that is heard by the inner or outer ear reveals “the soul of the sound and its expression of the one universal spirit”. In that internality, there is a “going of the sense into the depths of the sound... so that the ear is always listening to the infinite in its heard expression and the voice of its silence.”⁹

Aswapati thus enters into “a wonderful bodiless realm”.¹⁰ Travelling through the worlds as a representative of the race, it is not just his individual psychic being that he finds, but the psychic world. The position of the psychic being and the psychic world in relation to the other parts of our being and the other worlds was explained by Sri Aurobindo in a letter:

The psychic being stands behind mind, life and body, supporting them; so also the psychic world is not one world in the scale like the mental, vital or physical worlds, but stands behind all these and it is there that the souls evolving here retire for the time between life and life.¹¹

The special status of the psychic, Sri Aurobindo went on to say, is a logical consequence of its role in the evolutionary process:

If the psychic were only one principle in the rising order of body, life and mind on a par with the others and placed somewhere in the scale on the same footing as the others, it could not be the soul of all the rest, the divine element making the evolution of the others possible and using them as instruments for a growth through cosmic experience towards the Divine. So also the psychic world cannot be one among the other worlds to which the evolutionary being goes for supraphysical experience; it is a plane where it retires into itself for rest, for a spiritual assimilation of what it has experienced and for a replunging into its own fundamental consciousness and psychic nature.¹²

This peculiar relation of the psychic principle to the ascending hierarchy of the planes of being, represented in Savitri by the “world-stair”, is made still clearer in another letter:

There are in fact two systems simultaneously active in the organisation of the being and its parts: one is concentric, a series of rings or sheaths with the psychic at the centre; another is vertical, an ascension and descent, like a flight of steps, a series of superimposed planes with the supermind-overmind as the crucial nodus of the transition beyond the human into the Divine.¹³

It might seem as if the concentric system could be disregarded by those who only want to climb the steps leading to the supermind. If this transition “is to be at the same time a transformation”, however, Sri Aurobindo saw that the “series of conversions upwards” and the “turning down to convert the lower parts” could not succeed without “a conversion inwards, a going within to find the inmost psychic being and bring it out to the front”.¹⁴ In another letter, he wrote:

In this yoga the psychic being is that which opens the rest of the nature to the true supramental light and finally to the supreme Ananda. Mind can open by itself to its own higher reaches; it can still itself and widen into the Impersonal; it may too spiritualise itself in some kind of static liberation or Nirvana; but the supramental cannot find a sufficient base in a spiritualised mind alone.¹⁵

This necessity of the Yoga would appear to be the rationale behind Aswapati’s detour from the direct upward route when he makes the transition from Illumined Mind to Intuition via the World-Soul. Mind in him has already opened to its own higher reaches and widened into the Impersonal. But Intuition, as we have seen, “is the first plane in which there is a real opening to the full possibility of realisation”.¹⁶ The decisive movement which begins at this point cannot be fulfilled by relying on the mind and its knowledge alone, overlooking the deeper insight of the heart and the psychic being. When Aswapati has the vision of the Divine Mother after he emerges from the world-soul, it will be “in a sovereign answer to his heart” that the “eternal veil” is “half‑parted”.¹⁷

In the Gita, jnana culminates in bhakti for the Purushottama or Supreme Being in whom the dichotomy of Kshara and Akshara, the mutable world and immutable Self, is reconciled. But the Gita, as Sri Aurobindo observed, “follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world‑nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it”.¹⁸ Even Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana in its early phases, as recorded in the diary of his Yoga up to 1920, retained some features of this leaning on the Ishwara aspect; dasya (surrender), for example, was to the Ishwara or Krishna, though it might be “directly or through the Deva‑shaktis”.¹⁹ But by the time he wrote The Mother, in 1927, he had recognised that for a sadhana of terrestrial transformation, the central role of the Divine Mother is essential: “The Supreme demands your surrender to her....”²⁰

Psychic bhakti for the Divine Mother and surrender to her are the keys, then, to the supramental Yoga. Sri Aurobindo explained her relation to the Purushottama, Akshara and Kshara Purushas of the Gita as follows:

In regard to the Purushottama the Divine Mother is the supreme divine Consciousness and Power above the worlds, Adya Shakti; she carries the Supreme in herself and manifests the Divine in the worlds through the Akshara and Kshara. In regard to the Akshara she is the same Para Shakti holding the Purusha immobile in herself and also herself immobile in him at the back of all creation. In regard to the Kshara she is the mobile cosmic Energy manifesting all beings and forces.²¹

Though she pervades all the planes, however, her presence is not normally felt in the Akshara and Kshara until it has been realised in the Purushottama. The passage in Book Two, Canto Thirteen of Savitri about the “nameless Force”, quoted from an early manuscript in the last instalment, was later revised by Sri Aurobindo to bring out this sense of her absence in the experience of the immobile Self or Akshara Purusha, compelling Aswapati to go further in search of what he has not yet found:

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

14

(Mother India, October 2003)

The passage in Savitri where Sri Aurobindo has written most clearly and unmistakably about the plane of Intuition is in Book Ten, Canto Four, in Savitri’s last long speech before the “flaming moment of apocalypse”¹ when the Incarnation thrusts aside its veil and Death is vanquished. There, after lines on the “vastitudes” of a “cosmic Thought” (Higher Mind) and the “blaze of sight” of what is evidently the Illumined Mind,² with its “Oceans of an immortal luminousness” and its “Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks”,³ the description of the “radiant altitudes” rising from mind to Supermind continues:

Sri Aurobindo placed Intuition in the middle of the series of overhead planes, with Overmind and Supermind beyond it. Then why is it introduced here as a “highest flight”? Perhaps because, as is said in the fifth line of the above passage, it marks the beginning of a “seeing absolute” which has access to the highest truths of existence. Sri Aurobindo explained that Intuition differs from Overmind in that it “sees in flashes” and combines these flashes, while Overmind “sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally”.⁵ From this point of view, Overmind could be considered not so much a higher plane than Intuition as a wider one. What Savitri says when she goes on to speak of Overmind appears to support this distinction:

In “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”, the point where Aswapati reaches the plane of Intuition proper seems to come near the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen, after he emerges out of the psychic world. We have already detected the “truth-touch”⁷ of the Intuition in the symbol of the “luminous finger” in the preceding canto. There it was shown that the problem of existence is only half-solved by the realisation of the Self on an illumined plane of mind, bringing the liberating experience of the universal witness Purusha unaffected by the troubled movement of Prakriti. Even in the peace of the Self, Aswapati was made to feel the absence of the “nameless Force”, the Bliss and the Love of our “sweet and mighty Mother”.⁸ But this was done by a ray of Intuition falling on the plane below it. It is perhaps the same “finger” in another form that beckons him next into the world-soul which is “creation’s centre”⁹—not higher, but deeper than the worlds he has reached so far:

The description of his state of awareness on coming out of this realm suggests that Aswapati is now living in the true intuitive consciousness. This is confirmed by the nature of the experience that follows. The plane of Intuition is a “height” to which the “depth” of the world of soul, from which he has just emerged, answers in a special way and for which it is an ideal preparation. In the passage from Book Ten partially quoted above, we have seen that Intuition is a “highest flight” that “climbs to a deepest view”. The intuitive vision, Sri Aurobindo goes on to say in the same passage,

As Aswapati, leaving the world‑soul, proceeds along “a road of pure interior light” towards “the source of all things human and divine”,¹² his “knowledge... by identity” is described in a manner that resembles the above lines on Intuition, especially in the phrases “stripped bare” and “without its veils”:

Sri Aurobindo defined Intuition as a form of knowledge by identity:

Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity.¹³

The psychic consciousness, too, as described in Book Two, Canto Fourteen of Savitri, possesses a kind of knowledge by identity:

This “moved identity”, however, is not exactly the same thing as the higher forms of knowledge by identity on the planes of the “spirit’s infinity”. With regard to the psychic, Sri Aurobindo clarified that

its power is not knowledge but an essential or spiritual feeling—it has the clearest sense of the Truth and a sort of inherent perception of it which is of the nature of soul-perception and soul-feeling....¹⁵

Yet by virtue of its innate divinity, the psychic can participate in the ascent to higher planes of consciousness without itself having to be transformed:

It is not the psychic but the mind that gets raised and transformed and its action intensified by the intuitivising of the consciousness. The psychic is always the same in essence and adapts its action without need of transformation to any change of consciousness.¹⁶

This seems to be what happens when Aswapati’s soul passes on, watched by “nameless Gods”, until he has a vision of “the deathless Two-in-One” and the Goddess who stands behind them. This passage comes between what we have determined to be Illumined Mind (Book Two, Cantos Twelve and Thirteen) and what the poet has explicitly identified as Overmind (Canto Fifteen). We saw in the last instalment that the psychic world described in the first three paragraphs of Canto Fourteen is not part of the “vertical” series. But in the canto’s last paragraph, Aswapati resumes his ascent through the higher worlds. Judging by its position, therefore, the vision at the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen would appear to have been intended to illustrate experience on the plane of Intuition, which must be passed through to reach Overmind.

It must be added, however, that the vision which Aswapati has by means of the Intuition is evidently not confined in its content to realities belonging to a particular plane. For the intuitive consciousness, imaged elsewhere in Savitri as

may turn towards what is above or below it. But, being an “outleap of a superior light”,¹⁸ its natural movement is to bring us into contact with the highest truths of being. The divine figures that now appear to Aswapati’s inner vision seem to represent all the planes above Intuition itself, from Overmind to Sachchidananda. It is as if the essential structure of the manifestation and its relation to the Unmanifest were disclosed in one revelatory flash.

In an early draft of this passage (c. 1938), all the elements of the later expanded version were already present:

Here we meet in rapid succession the Overmind Gods, the supramental Ishwara‑Shakti, the transcendent Mother and the ineffable Absolute. This was written ten years or so after Sri Aurobindo had jotted down, in a notebook he used for the Record of Yoga in 1927, the diagrams that were mentioned in a previous instalment. In the second diagram,¹⁹ three “Absolutes” are listed that correspond closely to the present passage in Savitri. The first is the Avyakta Paratpara, the unmanifest Supreme, defined as “self-involved Sachchidananda, Parabrahman”.²⁰ This is evidently the “nameless Infinite” at the end of the above passage (changed in the final text of Savitri to “the Unknowable”). The “Second Absolute” is “Aditi ‑ M. [the Mother] containing in herself the Supreme. The Divine Consciousness, Force, Ananda upholding all the universes”. This is clearly the “mighty Goddess veiled” in the lines above. What is said about her was amplified considerably in later versions of Savitri, where she is described as

Finally, the “Third Absolute” listed in the diagram is the “Eternal Manifestation” presided over by “Parameswara + Parameswari”, who are “the timeless Two in One” in the 1938 version of Savitri and “the deathless Two-in-One” in the published text.

This diagram and another written on the preceding page are connected in content and terminology with two entries in the Record of Yoga, found in the same notebook, whose relation to Savitri prompted this inquiry into the planes of consciousness represented by the later cantos of Book Two. We are now in a position to look more closely at that relation. The second of the two short diary entries is of more interest for this purpose than the first, in which on 26 January 1927 the vision of “Parameswara-Parameswari”, but not Aditi, had been mentioned. On 1 February, Sri Aurobindo wrote, this time abbreviating “Parameswara-Parameswari”:

A step forward in Darshana (Aditi holding P^a‑Pⁱ in all living things, less vividly in all objects). This is not yet entirely universalised but it is increasing.²²

The second and third “Absolutes” defined in the diagram described above occur here. These correspond obviously enough to the “mighty Goddess” and the “Two in One” in the Savitri draft written a decade or so later.

This would appear, then, to be an example of an experience noted in the Record of Yoga at the time, which years afterwards was worked into Savitri. The example illustrates, nevertheless, the difficulty of correlating Savitri with any kind of chronological account of the development of Sri Aurobindo’s inner life even with the help of the Record of Yoga, however valuable such a comparative study may be. Though the vision of the “Two-in-One” and the “sole omnipotent Goddess” in Book Two, Canto Fourteen of Savitri strongly resembles the Darshana of “Parameswara-Parameswari” and Aditi recorded in Sri Aurobindo’s diary, we cannot necessarily conclude that the Record of Yoga gives us the date on which the spiritual event narrated more elaborately in Savitri really happened. If we assume that Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote this passage in Savitri, was recounting a decisive experience from a previous stage of his sadhana, we may suppose this to have occurred originally somewhat earlier than 1927—probably during the long period before the end of 1926 when no diary was kept or from which, in any case, none has survived. Or else he took legitimate poetic liberties with the actual experience when he incorporated it in his epic.

For Aswapati is depicted as having this vision in a state of profound inwardness. Its overwhelming intensity even causes him to lose consciousness at the end. The diary entry, on the other hand, refers to what Sri Aurobindo was seeing when he looked at “living things” and “objects” in the world around him, the normal meaning of “Darshana” in the Record of Yoga. Besides, this Darshana was not a single unique experience, but something that was “increasing” and on its way to being “universalised”. We have found, moreover, that the vision in Savitri occupies the position where Intuition ought to come in the scheme of “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”. But by the end of 1926, Sri Aurobindo had already achieved the fundamental Siddhi of the Overmind—although it was not until October 1927 that he coined the word “overmind” itself²³ and it would be several years before he described what had happened on 24 November 1926 as “the descent of Krishna into the physical”, adding that this meant “the descent of the Overmind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually, the descent of Supermind and Ananda”.²⁴ Therefore, it was in the context of a sadhana to bring the overmind transformation to a completion and begin the ascent beyond it that on 1 February 1927 he recorded seeing, everywhere he looked, Aditi holding Parameswara-Parameswari—the infinite Mother sustaining the supreme Lord of the worlds and, one with him, the supreme cosmic Power.

 

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Savitri and the Record of Yoga

15

(Mother India, November 2003)

We have seen that there are striking similarities between the powerful vision described near the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen of Savitri (“The World-Soul”) and a brief entry in the Record of Yoga on 1 February 1927. But it has not been possible to conclude without qualification that this passage in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, first drafted around 1938, is a poetic rendering of a particular, datable experience recorded over ten years earlier. Savitri does not, in fact, lend itself very often to such a precise chronological reading. Yet much of it is undoubtedly an accurate transcription of the spiritual experiences of the poet, sometimes remembered or relived many years later. Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter in 1946:

The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity.¹

He especially insisted that “all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character”.² No doubt, the autobiographical aspect of the poem has to be seen in the context of its elements of legend and symbol and the demands of its massive narrative structure and literary architecture. But such a work could not have been written without direct access to the domains of reality of which it speaks. From this point of view, the Record of Yoga can help us to gain a fuller understanding of the experiential background of Sri Aurobindo’s epic.

In Savitri, it is in the canto before Aswapati reaches the Overmind that he sees the “Two-in-One” and her who “brought them forth from the Unknowable”.³ In Sri Aurobindo’s diary, on the other hand, the Darshana of Parameswara-Parameswari and Aditi was recorded early in 1927 when he was already concerned with the Overmind itself, though he was not yet calling it by that name. Had he kept a diary from 1921 to 1926, including the period when he was concentrating on the intuitive transformation, perhaps we would have found an entry corresponding more exactly with Savitri. Be that as it may, the essential significance of the vision should not be affected by whether it is seen on the intuitive or on the overmental plane. The latter medium would simply impart a greater universality to the “seeing absolute”⁴ of which Intuition, too, is said to be capable in the degree of its less superhuman amplitude and intensity.

The significance of this vision lies in the healing of the rift between Purusha and Prakriti created by the separative faculty of mind and exaggerated on the lower spiritual planes for the sake of the liberation of the soul. The feminine principle of existence, represented by Prakriti, had been relegated by that exaggeration to a seemingly eternal status of inferiority and imperfection. Now she is vindicated not only as being an equal partner in the “Two-in-One” of Parameswara-Parameswari, but as reigning even beyond them in the form of what Sri Aurobindo, when he revised The Synthesis of Yoga, called “the supreme Shakti of the Supreme”:

In the gnosis the dualism of Purusha and Prakriti, Soul and Nature, two separate powers complementary to each other, the great truth of the Sankhyas founded on the practical truth of our present natural existence, disappears in their biune entity, the dynamic mystery of the occult Supreme. The Truth‑being is the Hara-Gauri^* of the Indian iconological symbol; it is the double Power masculine-feminine born from and supported by the supreme Shakti of the Supreme.⁵

The “gnosis” in which this “biune entity” is realised is ultimately what Sri Aurobindo termed the Supermind or Truth‑consciousness. But when he revised The Synthesis of Yoga in the 1930s, he qualified “the gnosis” earlier in the same paragraph by adding “even the mentalised gnosis”. As revised, these are the sentences that precede those quoted above:

On the other planes to which the mental being has easier access, man finds God in himself and himself in God; he becomes divine in essence rather than in person or nature. In the gnosis, even the mentalised gnosis, the Divine Eternal possesses, changes and stamps the human symbol, envelops and partly finds himself in the person and nature. The mental being at most receives or reflects that which is true, divine and eternal; the gnostic soul reaches a true identity, possesses the spirit and power of the truth-Nature.⁶

Though Sri Aurobindo did not define precisely what he meant by the expression “mentalised gnosis”, evidently it refers to at least the higher planes of spiritual mind below the Supermind. It is likely that not only Overmind, but Intuition—which we have seen to be “the first plane in which there is a real opening to the full possibility of realisation”⁷—was meant to be included as a plane on which the soul becomes capable of the beginning of a “true identity” with “the spirit and power of the truth-Nature”. Likewise, Intuition should perhaps be included in our understanding of what Sri Aurobindo meant by “a certain spiritual and supramental level” in a related statement in the revised Synthesis of Yoga, cited earlier in this series:

At a certain spiritual and supramental level the Duality becomes still more perfectly Two-in-one, the Master Soul with the Conscious Force within it, and its potentiality disowns all barriers and breaks through every limit.⁸

In the final text of Savitri, this “Two-in-one” appears in the following sentence near the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen; here, the original single line in which Aswapati “stood before the timeless Two in One”⁹ has been replaced by several lines:

Then comes the first appearance of the Goddess who is referred to in The Mother as the “one original transcendent Shakti” who “stands above all the worlds” and through whom the Supreme is “manifested... in the worlds as the one and dual consciousness of Ishwara‑Shakti”.¹¹ Here in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo writes of her:

In The Mother, he had expressed the same thing in different words:

Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother. Each is something that she has seen in her vision, gathered into her heart of beauty and power and created in her Ananda.¹²

Up to this point in the passage in Savitri, there has been a revelation of knowledge to the intuitive perception; but this has been of the nature of a representation and interpretation of supreme truths, as if the higher or the illumined mind had been uplifted to the plane of a more direct, supernal and all-unifying vision. Aswapati now begins to reach what Sri Aurobindo had written of in The Synthesis of Yoga as a “true identity” with “the spirit and power of the truth-Nature”. His sense of individual existence is not lost, however. Knowledge and the luminous force it brings merge into adoration (bhakti), expressed in ecstatic prayer:¹³

In response, an indescribable gesture seems to cast aside the worlds still intervening between him and the Highest:

Aswapati is now face to face with the Goddess on the highest level of the unmixed intuitive consciousness where, as Sri Aurobindo observed in The Life Divine,

its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of “stable lightnings”....¹⁵

Accordingly, the Mother’s cosmic being is experienced on this plane as an ocean of “honey and lightning”, on whose waves the soul is carried helplessly like an intoxicated swimmer:

The full and imperative force of this revelation proves to be more than what Aswapati can assimilate as yet. Apparently he still lacks the needed dharana-samarthya or sustaining capacity, whose importance Sri Aurobindo emphasised in his explanation of the sapta chatushtaya:

The body is the pratistha [support] in this material universe; for the working out of the divine lila on earth it is necessary that it should have especially the dharanasamarthyam or power of sustaining the full stream of force, of ananda, of widening knowledge & being which descends into mind and prana and the vital and bodily functions with the progress of the siddhi.¹⁷

In showing Aswapati’s inability to sustain for long the intensity of this experience, Sri Aurobindo may have intended to illustrate the inherent limits of the integrality that can be achieved in the transformation by Intuition. He wrote with regard to the action of this power:

It can thus change the whole consciousness into the stuff of intuition; for it brings its own greater radiant movement into the will, into the feelings and emotions, the life‑impulses, the action of sense and sensation, the very workings of the body consciousness; it recasts them in the light and power of truth and illumines their knowledge and their ignorance. A certain integration can thus take place, but whether it is a total integration must depend on the extent to which the new light is able to take up the subconscient and penetrate the fundamental Inconscience. Here the intuitive light and power may be hampered in its task because it is the edge of a delegated and modified supermind, but does not bring in the whole mass or body of the identity knowledge. The basis of Inconscience in our nature is too vast, deep and solid to be altogether penetrated, turned into light, transformed by an inferior power of the Truth‑nature.¹⁸

In Savitri, the ray of Intuition that falls in Book Two, Canto Thirteen exposes, “at the bottom of the sleepless stir”, the dark presence of the Inconscient,

But it is not until the first section of Book Three, Canto Three—where a transformation by the overmind gnosis, preparatory to the experience of the supramental world, seems to be represented²⁰—that Aswapati is depicted as effectively coming to grips with this most fundamental and intractable of all difficulties,

Stunning as the vision at the end of Book Two, Canto Fourteen is, the eternal veil is there only “half-parted” and the Goddess’ eyes remain a “ravishing enigma”.²² It is only in the second canto of “The Book of the Divine Mother” that Sri Aurobindo will be able to say decisively:

What Aswapati has seen with the intuitive vision he must complete in its effective power and assimilate to his normal consciousness by going on from the intuitive plane to the more comprehensive Overmind. In the Record of Yoga, where on 1 February 1927 Sri Aurobindo mentioned the Darshana of Aditi and Parameswara-Parameswari in the context of the overmental sadhana he was then engaged in, it was not in deep samadhi that he had this experience, but in his everyday waking state. He was by no means knocked flat by it. In the next paragraph of the same entry, he went on to write about the daily hours of walking which he usually referred to as “primary utthapana”:

Primary utthapana oppressed during the last days once more progresses. Stiffness and muscular pains are still possible, though they can be ejected by the knowledge‑will movement. They are most prominent when the exertion ceases, but do not endure. The latent memory however persists and brings them back at customary times or junctures.²⁴

It is perhaps not very easy to penetrate through the technical language and scientific objectivity of Sri Aurobindo’s Yogic diary to grasp the extraordinary significance of much of what is recorded there. His Record of Yoga has to be read in conjunction with his other writings, beginning with Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga, “The Yoga of Self‑Perfection”, whose practical application is seen in detail in the diary. For various reasons, a comparison with Sri Aurobindo’s other major record of his Yoga, Savitri, is far more difficult; yet we have seen that it can be rewarding. Cryptic diary entries, like the one about the Darshana of “Aditi holding P^a‑Pⁱ in all living things” which has been discussed in this series, become more meaningful when we read them in relation to the descriptions of the same or similar experiences in Savitri, where their living reality is conveyed in vivid and moving poetic language. At the same time, as I have tried to show, our understanding of Savitri is enriched by seeing in the diary the day-to-day working out of the details that had to be omitted when Sri Aurobindo set about telling the story of much of his inner life in the framework of “A Legend and a Symbol”.