Re: 09: Her Mortal Birth by RY Deshpande
A mysterious play Divine Savitri has consented to take mortal birth. This birth is in response to the invocation of Aswapati the Yogi who has prepared the ground for such an incarnation of hers. The birth of Aswapati itself is a feature of the “mysterious play” in which the Eternal limits his transcendental characteristics in the process of time. Aswapati comes as Avatar. But what does that mean, what is incarnation, what is Avatarhood? The Mother answers: 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.” He comes here to establish the Divine Power who will execute the Divine Will in the Creation. There is a twofold division of work, pertaining to Will and to Action. The formula is: he wills; she executes. Such indeed is the double aspect of Avatarhood. Not by self-propelled human effort, howsoever mighty it might be, but by a direct action of the transcendental Divine can the miracle of divine manifestation be possible here. Aswapati's birth must precede Savitri's birth.
The reason for invoking Savitri’s birth is, she alone can remove the obstacle that is standing across the path of the divine Event, Death obstructing the march of evolution towards love and beauty and joy and truth and harmony and perfection and immortality in the widening growth of knowledge. True, the Divine Shakti can do everything from above; but it is not the same thing as her accepting human birth, her coming down here and working in the lesser triple world of ignorance and falsehood and death. Not only impersonally, but personally too “she must stoop 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.”
We may discern the following from the Mother’s story of creation: there is first the Supreme’s wish to objectivise himself; in the sequel is the emanation of four beings to start the universal development; then occurs their separation from the Origin in the joy and freedom the four emanations 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. That is her first sacrifice. The second sacrifice comes in the nature of her mortal birth, when she accepts to pass through “portals of the birth that is a death”. (The Mother)
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. A “mysterious play” this, indeed.
N.B.: Reference may be made to Passing through the Portals of the Birth that is a Death at
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