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1 A guardian of the unconsoled abyss Inheriting the long agony of the globe, A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain
Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes That saw grief's timeless depths but not
life's goal. Afflicted by his
harsh divinity, Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased The daily oblation of her unwept tears.¹ THE deepest and the most
fundamental mystery of the human consciousness (and in fact of the earth
consciousness) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as
its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and I inconscience
and inertia that is Matter: it is this that the I submerged being is not
merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a
suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is
not articulate and in the open. The aboriginal is that which harbours in its womb the original being. That is the
Inconscient Godhead, the Divinity in pain – Mater Dolorosa the Divine
Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always
by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to
be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead
towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what
Savitri, the universal Divine Grace become material and human, finds at the
core of her being, the field ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri –
A Legend and a Symbol. Book 1, Canto 1
Page –
163 and centre of concentrated struggle, a
millennia1 aspiration petrified, a grief of ages congealed, a divinity lone and
benumbed in a trance. This divinity has to awake and labour. The god has to be
cruel to himself, for his divinity demands that he
must surpass himself, he cannot abdicate, let Nature go her own way, the
inferior path of ease and escape. The godhead must exercise its full authority,
exert all its pressure upon itself – tapas taptva – and by this heat of incubation release
the energy that leads towards the light and the high fulfilment. In the
meanwhile, the task is not easy. The divine sweetness and solicitude lights
upon this hardened divinity: but the inertia of the Inconscient, the 'Pani', hides still the light within its rocky cave and
would not deliver it. The Divine Grace, mellow with all the tears of love and
sympathy and tenderness she has gathered for the labouring godhead, has pity
for the hard lot of a humanity stone-bound to the
material life, yet yearning and surging towards freedom. The godhead is not
consoled or appeased until that freedom is achieved and light and immortality
released. The Grace is working slowly, laboriously perhaps but surely to that
end: the stone will wear down and melt one day. Is that fateful day come? That is the meaning of human life, the
significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a
"dire debate", "a fierce question", a constant struggle
between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration
"to be" and the will of inertia "not to be" – the friction,
to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap
forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears
physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusion – are
symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of
labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a
godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are
themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are
the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to
blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual
consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its
petty innocent-looking moments and events are the
Page – 164 steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest
life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our
experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the
immortal godhead in man. 2 Savitri, the Divine Grace in human form, is
upon earth. The Divine Consciousness has abandoned its own supreme
transcendental status to enter into the human consciousness and partake of the
earthly life: it has taken up a mortal frame, to live and dwell here below.
Only thus she can transform the lower animal nature into the divine nature,
raise man to godhead, make of earth heaven itself: A prodigal of her rich divinity, Her self and all she was she had lent to men, Hoping her greater being to implant That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.¹ But the task is not easy. The flesh is weak:
it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so,
it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the
touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality
loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly
being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the
boon that is brought to him, to his very door: he has only to receive and
accept in order to be saved out of all ignorance and grief, impotence and
death. The Divine Mother has forgotten herself, has made herself as small and
as close and native to earth as any earthly creature, like anyone of us, taken
upon herself all limitations and indignities, the entire burden of an earthly
life, graced with her presence this mortal atmosphere. But Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change; Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch: It fears the
pure divine intolerance ¹Op. cit. Book 1, Canto 1
Page – 165 Of that assault of ether and of fire; It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness, Almost with hate repels the light it brings;.
. .¹ As, however, "mortality bears ill the
eternal's touch", the eternal too is intolerant of the mortal nature – only
it is intolerant not in the ignorant blind squeamish weak human way, but in a
divine way, for it is armed with weapons of light and knowledge, it assaults
with its luminous force, the energy of ether and fire, the higher and nobler
elements as against the dense dark dumb earth, the lowest element that clothes
the human consciousness. Indeed, mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of
laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the unalloyed
sheer delight in Eternity. It is
out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra
firma, the mud and slime. The human consciousness has been fleeing the
Hound of Heaven down the corridors of Time, and yet it will be caught in the
end and wholly transmuted in the divine embrace into the substance of the
Divine Himself. All the unwillingness and protestation and revolt are meant to
forge and hammer the final union into something perfect, faultless, absolute. ¹ Op. cit. Book1, Canto 1
Page – 166
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