Passing through the Portals of the Birth that is a Death

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo writes:

“Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness.”

In the cosmic process the Purusha stands aside and allows Prakriti to do all the work of manifestation. In this process one of the first practical and essential things done was to create four qualities or the fourfold soul-force, the four swabhāvas, as the organisational basis. The Purusha handing over the initiative to Prakriti and himself becoming subject to her operational demands is the key step that was taken the moment things were ready for a certain larger and universal collective life. That was the happy optimism of the Purusha Sukta in which the Purusha offered himself to be sacrificed. In the language of Savitri:

He has forsaken his omnipotence,

His calm he has foregone and infinity.

He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;

To her he abandons all to make her great.

He hopes in her to find himself anew,

Incarnate, wedding his infinity’s peace

To her creative passion’s ecstasy.

Although possessor of the earth and heavens,

He leaves to her the cosmic management

And watches all, the Witness of her scene…

He leans on her for all he does and is…

In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs…

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,

His acts are her commandment’s registers.

Happy, inert he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance…

 

In the Bhagavata Purana we have the Bhagavati Shakti of Narayana as one who has established the whole universe, nārāyaņé bhagavati tad idam viśvam ahitam. She the executive Force accepts the three qualities,—represented by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva,—of the supreme Lord in order to give rise to this material creation. The needed support, ādhāra, for her work, for the work of the Prakriti is provided by the Purusha; it is the Being or Pure Existence who offers the vast and firm ground to the Chit-Shakti, the Consciousness-Force; it is the indispensable basis for her to do her work, statis becoming the foundation of dynamis. Hers is a long and arduous and painful task, a task also full of suffering, full of travail. What is a single-aspected oneness in the Transcendental starts becoming dual in the Overmental and lower creations, Prakriti becoming more and more prominent, more and more active than the Purusha. Therefore her personalities are the ones that stand out more distinctly in the cosmic working.

 

The four powers of the Chit-Shakti or the Divine Mother described by Sri Aurobindo in The Mother belong to this Overmental creation, with the Purusha aspects present only in the background. These four in us are understanding, life-dynamism, the sense of love and joy and beauty, and skill in work, our capacity to attend to minutiae and essentials, they all attaining perfection by which the will in the physical develops, each of the four characterising a certain trait in us, defining our swabhāva. That is how the soul in us grows. In fact it is the soul, the divine residing in us, that becomes an alchemic agent to bring about the transformation of the complex of this nature. These are the qualities or energies, guņas, śaktis, by which the individual as well as collective evolution advances.

Here is a paraphrase of the relevant text of The Mother:

•  Transcendental, the original supreme Shakti, stands above the worlds and links the
creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal,—the cosmic
Mahashakti creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all
these million processes and forces. Individual,—she embodies the power of these
two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates
between human personality and the divine Nature.

•  The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by the
Supreme. Each of the worlds is one play of the Mahashakti. At the summit of this
manifestation there are worlds of infinite existence, consciousness, force and bliss
over which the Mother stands unveiled eternal Power. Nearer to us are the worlds of
the supramental creation in which the Mother is the supramental Mahashakti, a
Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its
unfailing works and spontaneously perfect in every process. But here are the
worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in
consciousness from her source, of which the earth is a significant centre and
its evolution a crucial process. This too is upheld by the Universal Mother,
guided to its secret aim by the Mahashakti.

•  The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an
intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation.
She stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put in front
of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds.
These Emanations are the various divine forms and personalities through which
men have worshipped her under different names throughout the ages. But also she
prepares and shapes through these Powers and their emanations the minds and
bodies of her Vibhutis, even as she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for
the Vibhutis of the Ishwara, that she may manifest in the physical world and in
the disguise of the human consciousness some ray of her power and quality and
presence.

•  And then we have: The Mother not only governs all from above
but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things
here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her
creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force and they exist
because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that
was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great
sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But
personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may
lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to
the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this
world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the
transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her
children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended
to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and
the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death,
taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since
it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and
eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the
Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the
Divine Mother.

There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,—most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda. Only when the Four have founded their harmony and freedom of movement can those other rarer Powers manifest in the earth movement and the supramental action become possible.

The powers and personalities of the Divine Mother are for the work of manifestation. The four who stand out prominently are: Maheshwari as the aspect of Wisdom, Mahakali of Strength and Force, Mahalakshmi that of Harmony and Beauty, and Mahasaraswati who is the tireless worker for Perfection and Order. These four powers are the fourfold soul-forces and they operate variously in the cosmic scheme of things. The imperative is the appropriate and congruous working of these four powers in us, in a happy togetherness. Only when they have founded their harmony and freedom can the higher powers of the Mother operate in their dynamism. The aspect of well-organised collective life for the higher creation, preparing for the race of the gnostic beings is greatly dependent upon it.

The equivalence of these four powers described by Sri Aurobindo with the four qualities, swabhāvas, as we have in the ancient revelations, such as the Purusha Sukta or the Gita, is unmistakable. The fourfold order, or chaturvarņa as it is called, based on them is a spiritual order working in the occult domain of Nature, Prakriti. If we go by the account of the Purusha Sukta then, it seems, these powers were brought down more or less easily in splendid efficacy of the Sarvahuta Yajna, the Sacrifice of the All; the descent of other powers, indispensable for the supramental manifestation, falls outside its scope. We may somewhat look into this aspect by going through the story recited by the Mother. It is as follows. She is cautious also to say that it should be taken rather as a succinct story:

“When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation. So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth. You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself.... As soon as they set to work—they had their own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument… they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake—as I may call it—was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder. The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter —obscure, inconscient, miserable.... The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done. Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin. So, there have been what might be called ‘successive involutions’ in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others... for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds. That is my story.”

We may discern the following sequence in this narrative by the Mother: the Supreme’s wish to objectivise himself; emanation of four beings to start the universal development; their separation from the Origin in the joy and freedom they had; the result is the world as presently is; the creative Force, which had emanated these four Beings, is stunned on seeing what had happened; appalled, she turns to the Supreme and prays for the remedy; a command is given to her to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, her Truth into this falsehood, and she does it. That is the great sacrifice she has made, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother, of the creative Force.

Is this Holocaust of the creative Force the same as the Holocaust of the Purusha of the Purusha Sukta in which the Purusha was sacrificed? There are similarities between the two. In the Purusha Sukta the Gods and the Rishis and the Sadhyas invoked the Purusha and offered him in the sacrifice; in the other, the creative Force approached the Supreme and at his command precipitated her Consciousness and Love and Truth into the world that had come out of inconscience and suffering and falsehood. This is an involution that has happened only because someone willed it, and also paid a price for it to happen. The Holocaust is a result of that willing. The story of separation of the four beings from their supreme Origin is a former event, describing the involution prior to the holocaustic involution. Such is the story connected with the objectivisation of the Supreme.

In answer to a question on another occasion, the Mother said:

“The terrestrial world, the earth came into existence after the descent into the Inconscient, not before. The gradual formation of the different stages of being, from the Supreme to the most material region, is subsequent to the Inconscient… the birth of the Inconscient is prior to the formation of the world, and it was only when the perception came that the whole universe was going to be created uselessly that there was a call and Divine Love plunged into the Inconscient to change it into consciousness… The formation of the earth as we know it, this infinitesimal point in the immense universe, was made precisely in order to concentrate the effort of transformation upon one point… The other worlds have been organised more or less hierarchically, if one may say so, but the earth has a special formation due to the direct intervention, without any intermediary, of the supreme Consciousness in the Inconscient.” [Emphasis added by ron]

Such is the significance of Bhumi of the Purusha Sukta.

There is in Savitri a reference to the Originery involution at a couple of places, the first or the initiating involution concerned with the process of objectivisation, the Sacrifice of the Primal Purusha, of the Impersonal-Personal, the Unmanifest, Avyakta. Thus:

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

When all was plunged in the negating Void,

Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

If Being had not plunged into the dark

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

A contradiction founds the base of life:

The eternal, the divine Reality

Has faced itself with its own contraries;

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

The Purusha of Bliss-and-Knowledge-and-Force is bearing himself the cross of Sorrow-and-Ignorance-and-Helplessness, the triple mystic Cross. He volunteered to enter into the working contradiction, a rewarding contradiction of his own reality. This he has done precisely because it is in that and in no other way could God become greater by the fall.  [Emphasis added by ron]

In a mysterious dispensation’s law

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

 
And again:

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has entered with his silence into space:

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

He has built a million figures of his power;

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone.

 
This is the Grand Sacrifice, the Sacrifice by which a creation could be initiated, the utter Originery Sacrifice. Indeed, such is the mechanism by which the non-manifest Supreme could enter into the order of manifestation, a remarkable device by which One could be Many, bahusyām prajāyéyéti, as the Upanishad would say. But in Savitri there is no direct mention of the sacrifice pertaining to the cosmic administration or implementation, such as the creation of the Fourfold Order, the bringing down of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother, the second, the operative involution in the cosmic context.

However, apart from such many portentous involutionary sacrifices there are also, and of necessity, several evolutionary sacrifices of great significance,—and Savitri is rich in them. These pertain to the incarnations and the coming of the Avatars and the Vibhutis. Savitri herself “is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened out, so as to hew the ways of Immortality,” said Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters written in 1936. And about Satyavan? He is the “soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance.” Sri Aurobindo also says that the characters in the story of Savitri are not mere personified qualities, but are “incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.” These living incarnations are of a different kind than those of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother or of the four beings who went far away from the Source, the involutionary emanations.

But what is incarnation, what is Avatarhood? Let us go to the Mother’s answer. She says, Avatar is “the Supreme manifested on earth in a body.” And what is the work the Avatar comes to do? “To go up and down and join the top to the bottom, the whole secret of realisation.” This suggests that the Avatarhood of Satyavan, fallen in the grip of death, belongs to another category. About him the Mother says: “Satyavan—Well, he is the Avatar. He is the incarnation of the Supreme.” His is a kind of supportive incarnation set in the realm of Death. It makes the work of the Consciousness-Force in the Death’s realm possible. To do that, she incarnates personally on earth. That is Savitri’s incarnation.  She awoke when “Man lifted up the burden of his fate.” The Savitri-legend reveals us that. Without Satyavan Savitri exists not; without Savitri Satyavan cannot be rescued. In the process Savitri is the one who goes through “the portals of the birth that is a death.” [Emphasis added by ron] This also means, the Savitri-incarnation is different from the appearance of the Four Powers of the Consciousness-Force in the cosmic operation. While these Powers are typal, Savitri belongs to the evolutionary, one connected with the universal, the other with the earth.

The phrase “portals of the birth that is a death” is a beautiful description of this sorrowful world, this world of ours, of our mortal lot, our mortal state, of the conditions in which we make progress through them both together, through birth aided by death; in just a few words, we have here an incomparable picture of this mortal world, mŗtyuloka. Its poetic enchantment is such that the obscurity and the cheerlessness and the falsehood in which we live turn into their benign opposites. What we have in this mortal world is “the birth that is a death”. The two together are there to build the House of Life wherein the higher powers could come and dwell. If one knows that by which both the Knowledge and the Ignorance are known then, by the Ignorance one crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys immortality, as the Isha Upanishad says. Life in the present stage of evolution cannot make progress without death; it gives the helping hand. As a matter of fact, without death life would get swallowed by the hungry mouth of inconscience, the Light quenched by the darkness of the Night. A very astounding process this is, and we should really wonder at the wisdom that framed it. In Savitri we have the following: 

In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

In the brief stade between a death and birth

A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;

Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

and, tells Savitri to stiff incorrigible Death, 

…I know beyond all doubt,

The great stars burn with my unceasing fire

And life and death are both its fuel made.

Life only was my blind attempt to love:

Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.

After reading the line “life only was my blind attempt to love” the Mother said that it was her experience, that life without death was a blind attempt to love. It would not have won the victory for the Divine, victory over the forces of dark and terrible uncompromising Inconscience, an antagonist shadow thick as the Void. But after winning the victory death is no longer necessary, and all struggle would vanish. Such is the mystery of death.

Elsewhere the Mother tells that the four emanations, those first beings of the universe, the four Asuras, cannot be got rid of so easily, by winning just one war. “As long as they are necessary for the universal evolution they will exist. The day they lose their utility, they will be converted or will disappear… There were four of them. The first one has been converted; another is dissolved into its origin. Two are still living and these two are more ferocious than the others. One is known in occultism as the ‘Lord of Falsehood’, the other is the ‘Lord of Death’. And as long as these two beings exist, there will be difficulties.”

Therefore, personally too the Divine Mother descends to conquer Death. “In her deep and greater love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life.” The Mother’s prayers are in that respect extremely revealing. Here are some of them:

•  I have had days when I have lived truly all the horrors of creation
(and in the consciousness of their horror), and then that has brought this
experience, and... all the horror has disappeared.

•  Oh, the horror of falsehood spread everywhere on earth, ruling the world
with its law of darkness! I believe that its reign has lasted long enough; this
is the master we must now refuse to serve. This is the great, the only remedy.

•  MY Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down 
into the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of 
the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme
obscurity. But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the 
call which could arrive to Thee: “Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies appear 
triumphant; falsehood is the monarch of the world; life without Thee is a death, a
perpetual hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out
Submission; Faith is spent, Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous
instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love.
Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies to prevail, falsehood and ugliness and
suffering to triumph? Lord, give the command to conquer and victory will be
there. I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not yet ready. But I cry to
Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save.”
Thus, my prayer rushed up towards Thee; and, from the depths of the abyss, I
beheld Thee in Thy radiant splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou saidst to me:
“Lose not courage, be firm, be confident,—I COME.” 

Such intensity of anguish! Such totality of commitment to do the work the Lord has given to her! She is prepared to bear the assaults of the adversary force, the extreme of pain and suffering. Hers is the work connected with the evolutionary soul of the earth into which she has entered and no hardship she discounts in making it progress towards the Divine. It is for that purpose she passes through the portals of the life that is a death. We have the following description in Savitri about the Incarnate’s soul accepting earthly suffering:

A being stood immortal in transience,

Deathless dallying with momentary things,

In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness

Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate

Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:

Observer of the silent steps of the hours,

Eternity upheld the minute’s acts

And the passing scenes of the Everlasting’s play.

In the mystery of its selecting will,

In the Divine Comedy a participant,

The Spirit’s conscious representative,

God’s delegate in our humanity,

Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent’s ray,

She had come into the mortal body’s room

To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.

A joy in the world her master movement here,

The passion of the game lighted her eyes:

A smile on her lips welcomed earth’s bliss and grief,

A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.

All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth

Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,

Crossing the years to immortality;

All she could front with the strong spirit’s peace.

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

As a mother feels and shares her children’s lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

 

Such is the sacrifice, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother as a person, she facing the pang and forgetting the bliss in order to send us her glory and her powers. Our own birth itself is a startling mystery: “…when a psychic being enters a body, it is as though it fell on its head—it is a little stunned for a time. So during this period it is under the influence of these suggestions without even knowing it. But as soon as it wakes up, it can come out of that; it is not at all necessary to accept them.” This is what the Mother explains. Here the psychic being is entering into the portals of the birth that is accompanied by death. [Emphasis added by ron]

Why does the psychic being cross these painful portals? Narad explains the mystery to Savitri’s mother, of the choice made by it to plunge into the evolutionary process. It was “out of curiosity” that it took the plunge, seeing the possibility of another joy in creation.

Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,

In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

The soul looked out from its felicity.

It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,

It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,

It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.

Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,

It strained towards some otherness of self,

It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night…

As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown…

A huge descent began, a giant fall…

Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,

This great perplexed and discontented world,

This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain.

 
“One does not progress outside terrestrial life. The earthly, material life is essentially the life of progress, it is here that one makes progress,”—says the Mother.  [Emphasis added by ron] And those who want to escape it will be “compelled to progress whether they want it or not. The psychic being itself progresses in them and they are not conscious of it. But they themselves are compelled to progress. That is to say, they follow a curve. They follow an ascent in life. It is the same progress as that of the growing child…” And then: “…even the Divine, when incarnate on earth, is subject to the same law of progress. His instrument of manifestation, the physical being he has assumed, should be in a constant state of progress, and the law of his personal self-expression is in a way linked to the general law of earthly progress. Thus, even the embodied god cannot be perfect on earth until men are ready to understand and accept perfection.” Significantly, she says “…even the Divine.”

As one particular incarnation,—call her the sweet Mother, call her Savitri, call her a fit intermediary, a beautiful slave of God, the incarnate who came here in the ancient past, the embodied Word or a living Scripture, a spirit who arrived from the immortal spaces to set her conquering foot on Time, the divine Consciousness-Force, or Mahashakti born on earth,—she, in the field of evolution, has ever been engaged in the work of her Lord. Her yoga-tapasya progresses in the Will of the Lord, her power grows in the Will of the Lord, her action is in the Will of the Lord. A prayer of the Mother speaks of amplitude and majesty, nobility and grace, charm and grandeur, variety and strength, “for it is the will of the Lord to manifest.” For that purpose she is ready to suffer, she is ready to accept cruel “lamentable limitations”, climb up the Calvary of deep-rooted frustration, bear ignominy of human births. This is the personal aspect of the Sacrifice, of the Divine Soul. More specifically, Savitri’s mortal birth was compelled by the world’s desire; she came here answering the earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss. Savitri came here to hew the ways of Immortality. But she has been here all along, and she will continue to be here even as the evolution marches from Ignorance into Knowledge. Apropos of the mode and purpose of incarnation, Sri Aurobindo writes that it is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar.

 
There are also the great and splendid embodiments of the Divine Mother, her Powers and Personalities carrying out the cosmic work. The Four Powers of the Mother are of such a type. They don’t pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, they don’t accept the “lamentable limitations”, they don’t climb up the Calvary of deep-rooted frustration, bear the ignominy of human births. Once the Mother told the Goddess Durga the magic of surrender to the Lord and then only did Durga, with utter astonishment, see its marvel and its power. Lakshmi, Saraswati, Gauri, Uma, Amba, Bhavani, Parvati, Kali, and in a way even the Madonnas who are present in the cosmic field, are powers and personalities of the Divine Mother, essentially typal in character. There are goddesses and goddesses, devis and matrikas, there are lesser vital embodiments also, embodiments who have drifted far away from her; there are alluring females too, like la belle dame sans merci, and frightful women in a bouge with perilous beauty and charm. But let us take the Mother of Compassion, Karunamayi Mata, we meet in Savitri; she suffers no doubt, but not the way does Savitri, the incarnation that Savitri is. Hers is a picture of Grief Divine:

A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair,

A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.

A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,

Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.

A divine pity on the peaks of the world,

A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,

She looked out far and saw from inner mind

This questionable world of outward things,

Of false appearances and plausible shapes,

This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,

The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars

And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.

Accepting the universe as her body of woe,

The Mother of the seven sorrows bore

The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart:

The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,

Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.

Her heart was riven with the world’s agony

And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,

An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice…

And she herself tells to Savitri:

To share the suffering of the world I came,

I draw my children’s pangs into my breast.

I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;

I am the soul of all who wailing writhe

Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.

I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;

I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows…

The scream of tortured flesh and tortured hearts

Fall’n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven

Has rent with helpless grief and wrath my soul…

Nothing refusing of creation’s load,

I have borne all and know I still must bear…

I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,

Watched Nature’s cruelty to suffering things

While God passed silent by nor turned to help…

I am the hope that looks towards my God,

My God who never came to me till now;

His voice I hear that ever says ‘I come’:

I know that one day he shall come at last.

What are the seven stabs she bore? Here is Stabat Mater with emotions, Our Lady at the Cross and not at the Manger, at Calvary and not at Bethlehem; here is Mary at the Cross and not at the Cradle. Her Seven Sorrows are:

The Prophecy of Simeon

The Flight into Egypt

The Loss of Jesus in the Temple

Mary meets Jesus Carrying the Cross

The Crucifixion

Mary Receives the Dead Body of Her Son

The Burial of Her Son and Closing of the Tomb

Great as the sea was her sorrow. Her prayer is: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. In the Fifth Dolor, the Crucifixion, Mary stood beneath the Cross and watched her Son suffer and die, her heart was united with his. She cried: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. This may be very tender and touching, very poignant, even to a good extent deeply psychic; but the sweet and spiritual which is there in Savitri’s Mother of Compassion, the Grief Divine, duhkhi-kashti devi, does not come out with that reassuring definiteness. Perhaps this is because this Mother of Sorrows is typal. She does not pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, which Savitri does. In that sense this incarnation of the Divine Mother, as Savitri, is just not an embodiment; it is an incarnation. Savitri’s is a sacrifice of a different kind. According to the Law of Sacrifice “a divinising, a saving power descends” to carry the earthly evolution towards greater godhood, even making that godhood’s greater manifestation here more and more possible. Savitri does it by accepting the earthly conditions in their totality.

The Mother explains the aspect of sacrifice as follows:

“The Divine has sacrificed Himself in Matter to awaken consciousness in Matter, which had become inconscient. And it is this sacrifice, this giving of the Divine in Matter, that is to say, His dispersion in Matter, which justifies the sacrifice of Matter to the Divine and makes it obligatory; for it is one and the same reciprocal movement. It is because the Divine has given Himself in Matter and scattered Himself everywhere in Matter to awaken it to the divine consciousness, that Matter is automatically under the obligation to give itself to the Divine. It is a mutual and reciprocal sacrifice. And this is the great secret of the Gita: the affirmation of the divine Presence in the very heart of Matter. And that is why, Matter must sacrifice itself to the Divine, automatically, even unconsciously—whether one wants it or not, this is what happens.”

But, actually, it is the Divine Mother as incarnate Savitri who does the Yoga of Surrender to the Supreme and it is she who identifies her will with the Will of the Supreme. Only this incarnation, of Savitri, that can do it and not the other powers and personalities or embodiments. The surety of the success is also there in this Yoga of Savitri. She alone, and not other powers and personalities or embodiments, can attain the needed perfection. Savitri was “sent forth of old beneath the stars” of the dark Night for doing that Yoga.

About the divine will, the divine play, here is the Mother’s Sakyamuni-experience which is very significant:

“The days have gone by, stormy and troubled to all appearance but calm and strong in their reality reflecting Thy divine will; they have gone by, deploying, disclosing, developing once more all the unexpected and varied splendour of Thy untiring divine play. And how marvellous it is to watch this when one perceives the infinite criss-crossing of the movements Thy eternal will creates, when one knows that all this is from all eternity and that it is only in our imperfect faculties that it becomes an uninterrupted succession of facts, in which we are gratuitous and ignorant actors. We act with the apparent unconsciousness and blindness of those who do not know, and yet, I do know and, even while being an actor, I am a spectator too. But I am still not pure enough for Thee to unveil before my eyes the totality of the effects and results; it is only partially and imperfectly that I know them before the act and am permitted to act with the knowledge of the ‘why’, with a full illumination as to what Thou expectest from me. When, O Lord, shall I have this purity? But for that too I am no longer impatient and no longer implore. I see how much Thy splendours are obscured and veiled in this miserable and poor instrument; but Thou, Thou knowest why it is thus; and these its shadows and weaknesses Thou dost also use for Thy eternal ends. My soul is in prayer and bows down in love before what it can understand and know of Thee. My soul is in prayer and gives itself unreservedly to Thee in one of those sublime fervours which culminate in identification. My soul is in prayer… and my body too; and my thought is silent in a mute ecstasy.”

And then she receives the communication:

The mystery of manifestation is “[more] terrible and unfathomable than the Eternal Cause”; it indeed looks strange, the problem of death and ignorance arising out of the immortal spirit full of knowledge and wisdom, prajnānam brahma giving rise to its weird extreme opposites. However, it is precisely to remove that mystery, to bestow reality’s sense and purpose, to discover the law that governs it that the divine Soul takes birth here. What is true of the Chit-Shakti’s incarnations passing through the portals of the life that is a death, is also true for the supreme Purusha’s incarnations, the Avatars and also the great Vibhutis. But why does this Divine come at all, and does he really undergo the thousand sufferings our flesh is prone to? When the Divine comes, asserts Sri Aurobindo in a letter to Dilip Roy, he suffers or struggles not for himself “but in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real… the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them.” And then: “The manifestation of the Divine in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity and find the way to realise it… The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way—men need not be extraordinary beings to follow it. That is the mistake you are making—to harp on greatness as if only the great can be spiritual.” This was in the mid-1930s. But even during the earlier period Sri Aurobindo, speaking about himself, said in letter written in 1911: “I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful.” A work severe and painful—and it stands to perfect reason that anyone wishing to change the earth-nature must work hard against all odds, against every kind of antagonism, first bear its law, the law of anguish and suffering, must come in contact with the harsh reality of this life, this existence on earth. In a letter written to Dilip Roy Sri Aurobindo quotes a stanza from his own poem A God’s Labour, unpublished at that time, in 1935:

He who would bring the heavens here,

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

The heavy yoke of Death and Ignorance he must bear to do God’s work precisely in those conditions. But in the next stanza the description proceeds to make a revealing statement; it is about the deep and occult process by which the Divine Soul carries out his work:

Coercing my godhead I have come down

Here on the sordid earth,

Ignorant, labouring, human grown

Twixt the gates of death and birth.

 
Here is the Sacrifice of the supreme Purusha; here is his coming down personally too, and his passing through the portals of the life that is a death. [Emphasis added by ron] The incarnation must “reach the grim foundation stone, knock at the keyless gates”, pass through “the gates of death and birth”, accept the life that is a death. In Savitri we have a much direr description of the pain suffered by the Avatar. Aswapati, in order to discover the cause of this world’s failure, has entered into the depths of the primordial Night. There,

All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;

His spirit became an empty listening gulf

Void of the dead illusion of a world:

Nothing was left, not even an evil face.

He was alone with the grey python Night.

A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,

Which seemed alive but without body or mind,

Lusted all beings to annihilate

That it might be for ever nude and sole.

As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,

Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,

Attracted to some black and giant mouth

And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,

His being from its own vision disappeared

Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.

A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,

A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,

A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;

Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home

And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy

Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;

Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.

Existence smothered travailed to survive;

Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,

Belief and memory abolished died

And all that helps the spirit in its course.

There crawled through every tense and aching nerve

Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail

A nameless and unutterable fear.

As a sea nears a victim bound and still,

The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb

Of an implacable eternity