We have here Sri Aurobindo’s supreme Word established

Re: 11: The Sun from which we Kindle all our Suns by RY Deshpande

on Tue 15 May 2007 02:39 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link

Savitri is the Force, the inevitable Word It is in play of the transcendental speech or parā vāņī that we have the full expressive power of the supreme Logos. Like sweet and fertilisng waters of luminous music, the soul of delight grows in it from richness to greater and agreeable richness, bringing to our worlds the supernal harmonies. But always there has to be the all-pervasive silence to carry these rivers of sound, of infinite distances, in their rushing speeds to lands and countries of peace and quietude. In the Rhythm of the Word are built world after world, and in the Rhythm of the Word move the sun and all the other stars. Its creative force creates and sustains everything.

The Unspoken upholds, with its power of countless possibilities, that which it lets itself lose in inundations of the spoken. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is at once such “a power of silence in the depths of God” and “the Force, the inevitable Word” by whose splendid magical strength the supremely potential becomes the superbly actual. It is the flawless fusion of sense and sound and sight, ever ushering in the divine experience. It is mantra, Word embodying the Truth in its substance and in its movements. In the listening quiet a miracle is wrought by its up-streaming and down-streaming incantations, its self-willed and self-assured cadences swaying and stirring the fields of sleep to divine action in the celebration of its moods of wonder. In it, to use Amal Kiran’s phrase from his Savitri, “tongues of fire break from a voiceless deep”. But to put it in Sri Aurobindo's defining words, the mantra is

…a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are born from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.

This is precisely what we have in Savitri, this “poem of sacred delight”. Of this parā vāņī, rhythm and sight and the reality of things are the great revelatory attributes. If sometimes all the three come as a trinity from the sheer plenary Truth-world, from the Vedic Home of Truth, ŗtasya sadanam, very often it is one aspect or the other that stands out in a more perceptibly significant manner. Thus we have the pure mantra, majestic and holding all, lucid and undiminished anywhere in its calm undisturbed sea-like grandeur, lit by the blazing sun from within and mooned from above by the sweet and enchanting goddess of beauty in the wide tranquil sky:

A burning Love from white spiritual founts

Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;

Suffering was lost in her immortal smile...

All the elements of poetry are aglow in it, aglow like several suns in their gold-and-bright spiritual intensity and force, yet sweet and felicitous in their psychic ardour and association, aglow in a neo-Vedic soul-body of the mantra. At times gentle and soft overtones pushing a suggestive sense to culmination of the reality’s substance, or else a marvellous iconopoeia carrying with it both logopoeia and melopoeia, as in the line “Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss”, or often enough revealing the occultly packed mystery of the Night in a lustrous creative play, we have here a ruby-and-topaz fire pouring the raptures of luminous gods on the expectant heart of terrestrial creatures and things. To bring happiness and perfection to this transient and sorrowful material world does, by the power of that invocation, a Presence come out of the utter Unknowable.

The prayer—like Agni himself sweet of joy and one who has with him the Truth—is a persuasive adoration of that benign All-Beautiful to bestow on the suffering human boons of God-light and God-felicity. It is an absolute and compelling adoration in every respect. With it only can the divine multitude, or as the Veda says, the Divine People, divyam janam, appear on the earth; it only can make Time step into Eternity’s marvels. Only then shall the “indignity of mortal life” be cancelled, and pain turned into ecstasy. If mantra is always charged with power, is a Word that creates happy majesties, and desirable excellences, brings realisation of what it utters, then we have here Sri Aurobindo’s supreme Word established in the earth-consciousness to transform it into the divine substance of Truth, Beauty, Delight, into God-Life, all held by the Spirit’s vast calm. RYD