The English of Savitri: Volume 10 (Book Two - The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds - Cantos Twelve to Fifteen)

Volume 10 of The English of Savitri follows Aswapati’s upward climb into still more sublime regions of consciousness, helping the reader decipher their profound and mystical significances. It covers the last four cantos of “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”, while contexualising Aswapati’s entire journey with its extensive introduction.

 In Canto Twelve, “The Heavens of the Ideal”, Sri Aurobindo describes a staircase ‘Mounting in haste to the Eternal’s house’, and

At either end of each effulgent stair

The Heavens of the ideal Mind were seen

In a blue lucency of dreaming Space

Like strips of brilliant sky clinging to the moon. (60)

On one side were ‘The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.’ (60) Sri Aurobindo depicts this realm as existing deep within, ‘behind our life’:

Unseen, unguessed by the blind suffering world,

Climbing from Nature’s deep surrendered heart

It blooms for ever at the feet of God,

Fed by life’s sacrificial mysteries.

He further explains that ‘Here too its bud is born in human breasts; / Then by a touch, a presence or a voice / The world is turned into a temple ground / And all discloses the unknown Beloved.’ (62-63) Shraddhavan clarifies “that this ‘Rose’ has something to do with our psychic being”. (63) After describing the ‘sweetness and delight’ of this realm, Sri Aurobindo explains that

    On the other side of the eternal stairs

The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame

Aspired to reach the Being’s absolutes.

Out of the sorrow and darkness of the world,

Out of the depths where life and thought are tombed,

Lonely mounts up to heaven the deathless Flame. (70)

Shraddhavan comments: “That aspiration for something truer and purer has a power in it; it has an energy in it; and it is immortal, ‘deathless’.” (70-71) She says, “Each step is a little more powerful and energetic than the one before it; it has more force, more energy. And then the poet gives examples of those different levels.” (72) 

Canto Thirteen, “In the Self of Mind”, describes a summit on the rising stair of worlds. The poet says, ‘At last there came a bare indifferent sky / Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice, / But answered nothing to its million calls; / The soul’s endless question met with no response.’ (87) This realm is described as ‘a mighty calm’, ‘a blank of wordless peace’. (88) The poet describes it as ‘Omnipotent, immobile and aloof, / In the world which sprang from it, it took no part’. (89) Aswapati unites with this witness self. Shraddhavan comments that “the realisation which he will describe for us in this canto has been the goal of thousands of years of spiritual seeking, and that those who have reached it often felt that they have truly reached the summit of existence.”(89) Aswapati, however, soon realises that it is not the highest Truth. He understands that it

Was some pale front of the Unknowable;

A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self,

Its liberation and immobile calm

A void recoil of being from Time-made things,

Not the self-vision of Eternity. (106)

Shraddhavan comments: “It may seem like the ultimate realisation, but Aswapati feels that something absolutely fundamental is missing: ‘the…Force’, the power that has brought all this into existence, and that keeps it all in existence, that mother-power, who says ‘Yes’ to all of us, to all the things that she made, is simply not there”. (107) The commentary on this canto closes with a short talk by the late Prof. Arabinda Basu, a well-respected philosophy professor, explaining this Self of Mind.

The next canto, “The World-Soul”, is one of the most beautiful and profound cantos in the poem. Shraddhavan reveals at the outset, “Out of all the 49 cantos this is perhaps the one that I love the best.” (121) We have seen that although the Self of Mind is liberating and peaceful, it lacks something essential. But here Aswapati discovers a different experience that is absolutely fulfilling. It comes to him as if calling from some depth of his being, ‘A well, a tunnel of the depths of God’(122), ‘An intimation of a lurking joy / That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss’. (124) It calls, entices him:

As one drawn to his lost spiritual home

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

Into a passage dim and tremulous

That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,

He travelled led by a mysterious sound. (125)

This ‘mysterious sound’ takes many different forms, such as ‘the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved’, ‘a lonely flute’, and ‘’A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells’(125-127), experiences familiar to many spiritual seekers. Following these inward sounds, Aswapati comes into ‘a wonderful bodiless realm’. (130)

The silent soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

A single Person who was himself and all

And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs

Transfigured into beats divine and pure. (131).

Sri Aurobindo describes the beauty, wonder and delight of this realm, and Shraddhavan elucidates his sublime and mystical illustrations with her explanations and clarifications.

The oneness of all beings and things with God that characterises this world was not its only wonder; it also had a function, a crucial role in the life of our world. As Sri Aurobindo says,

    Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there

In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.

Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,

Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

They had returned into the world’s deep soul. (144-145)

This is the place where our souls go to rest between one life on earth and the next. Sri Aurobindo describes here what happens during this period. For example, he says: ‘In trance they gathered back their bygone selves, / In a background memory’s foreseeing muse / Prophetic of new personality / Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course’. (146) The souls review and assimilate their previous life on earth, and prepare the “map” of their future destiny.

Aswapati continues journeying inward:

Along a road of pure interior light

Alone between tremendous Presences,

Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

To the source of all things human and divine. (152)

Aswapati sees ‘the deathless Two-in-One, / A single being in two bodies clasped / Seated absorbed in deep creative joy; / Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.’ (153) Behind this ‘Two-in-One’, Aswapati sees another being, ‘Who brought them forth from the Unknowable’. (153) Shraddhavan explains: “This is one of the places in the poem where we get a description, an evocation, of the supreme Divine Mother.” (154) Aswapati is ‘Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss / … / He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone’. (157) These lines end this amazing canto; Aswapati has surrendered himself to the Mother, and, overwhelmed, he lies unconscious at her feet.

In the fifteenth and final canto of Book Two, “The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge”, Aswapati awakes from his unconscious slumber at the Mother’s feet, and returns to the ‘surface fields’ of consciousness. He finds himself ‘in a realm of boundless silences / Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds’. Shraddhavan explains that “[i]t is the experience of the pure Self on a higher plane than the plane ‘of Mind’.” (163) Sri Aurobindo describes this state in many ways in many lines. He calls it ‘A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds’, and ‘A lonely station of Omniscience’. (164) Shraddhavan elaborates on many of his descriptions; for example, she says, “There came too ‘The Knowledge by which the knower is the known’: the power of ‘knowledge by identity’. Above all, there is not only oneness through ‘Knowledge’; there is also oneness through ‘Love’, the ultimate form of ‘Love’; ‘The Love in which beloved and lover are one’: the ultimate union.” (165) In her concluding comments, she says, “Aswapati has ‘reached the top of all that can be known’. He has reached the borders ‘of the empire of the Sun’. He is able to control the ‘cosmic Force’. But he still has not found the transforming power that he was looking for, the Power that can bring about the divinisation of Matter and a Divine Life on Earth. So Aswapati will continue to look for that, in the next Book, Book Three: The Book of the Divine Mother. (189)

—Larry Seidlitz

Larry Seidlitz, Ph.D., is a psychologist and scholar focusing on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He is presently associated with the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research (SACAR), where he facilitates online courses on Sri Aurobindo’s teachings. For many years he edited Collaboration, a USA-based journal on the Integral Yoga, and has authored the books Transforming Lives, Integral Yoga at Work, and The Spiritual Evolution of the Soul.

Reviewed in August 2022