October 22, 2007

An amazing poetic logic to accomplish the miracle of tracing the entire course of this measureless evolution

Book of Fate—Narad comes chanting five songs by RY Deshpande on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:56 PM PDT Permanent Link [Based on a talk given at Savitri Bhavan on 5 October 2006, Part I. A good deal of material presented here has been drawn from my book Narad’s Arrival at Madra.]
The cry of the Truth is the cry of the involved Being’s, the Being, the Purusha, locked up in bottomless pit of the Involution; it is that cry which is trying to emerge out of the Night. The wise dynamic Force with her feeling and concern for this Truth, and the working of the Idea though alienated from the Real,—they both are present in the mute breast of Nature. The result of these high involvements, the involvement of the Truth-Idea-Force, is the growth of consciousness that has presently arrived at the human stage. All this progress has taken place in Ignorance; but being the cry of the Truth itself, it shall proceed beyond it and step into the vasts of Knowledge. This in the very nature of things is inevitable, willed as it is in the eminence of the manifesting Real-Idea.

He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.

This is the fifth song Narad is singing when he is about to alight upon Earth. The theme is of the glory and marvel entering into the unfolding evolution. By this evolving soul are left behind the dreadful abysms of Ignorance and it is now ready to step into Knowledge; the broad vistas of Truth-Idea stretch invisibly on; the veil is getting thinner and thinner; the splendid possibility of divine Wonder living in Matter’s house has been unequivocally asserted. The life divine shall be real in the divine’s birth on earth. There is harmony and sweetness and joy; the involved Spirit has triumphed over the obduracy of the physical Nature. In the divine multitude’s oneness is the victory of the Spirit. Out of that shall arise a new and marvellous creation. Sad thoughts have become sweet songs. The long-suffering existence is now changing into a thing of beauty which is a joy for ever.

By the process of an amazing poetic logic, with the swift-running force of a narrative, revelatory with the power to realise what is revealed, the poet has accomplished the miracle of tracing the entire course of this measureless evolution, accomplished just with a few tens of lines the stupendous. Out of the Inconscience and the obscurity of Matter came first Life and then Mind; what is now expected is the glory and marvel of the divine birth, the gold-green organic birth of the name of Vishnu here. Such is the delightful song of Narad in the rasa of felicitous devotion, imbued with its bliss. This song has the entirety of sweetness to bring joy to the hostiles who have stood too long in the way of this growth of consciousness. They are happy that they will soon be vanquished in the greatness of the Spirit and that, in its victory, their horrendous task will get terminated; the product of the dark Inconscience shall be metamorphosed into its divine element.

And as he sang the demons wept with joy
Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task
And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,
And glad release from their self-chosen doom
And return into the One from whom they came.

Evolution need not have been a painful process, explains Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters. But then a dark possibility could have been there, left unattended, remaining untapped, and it had to be worked out and exhausted, its potential turned into a divine opportunity. In this many-dimensional unfoldment of the divine delight the infinity of Inconscience had to be met in its full scope and operative might. In response to every descent that had occurred until now, it always threw answers antagonistically to distort it, if not destroy it. Therefore, triumphing over it means establishing a greater delight in mode of the very existence-consciousness itself. The demons now return into the supreme Origin from where they had come, back to the bright Womb of Creation. Thus is cleared the hazardless way for the evolution to grow from lesser knowledge to greater knowledge, to the widening infinity of knowledge. The miracle is of reaching, via the gainful Ignorance, the divine multitude by the mechanism offered by such an extraordinary possibility.

After a long journey from Paradise to Earth, Narad the heavenly sage now reaches his destination. His stadia on the way were: Heaven, World-Soul, Mind, Material Things, Earth and now he is here, on the banks of Alacananda, in the crown city of king Aswapati, Madra, flowering up in delicate stone. It is on one summer morning that Narad visits the king’s palace. After meeting the royal family he leaves the palace at noon, more importantly, after delivering the Word of Fate. He must have been here for about four or five hours of the morning. Wouldn’t that morning prove to be the auroral morning in the brightness of the topaz sun? Such is the beauty and charm of Savitri’s poetry.

This theory of evolution traced in Narad’s five songs, appears in different forms in different places in the epic’s narrative. We have a long description of it, a lucid and gorgeous essay in verse, when Savitri launches herself on the yogic journey exploring the inner depths of her being. (pp. 477-87) The first thing she notices is the cosmic past, moving through it as in a dream. She notices the shadowy beginnings of the world-fate, how from the indeterminate state creation took its first mysterious steps and how the human creature was born in Time. By the labour of the blind World-Energy a conscious being was made. “This is the little surface of man's life”, man who lives unknown to himself. And yet there is the ancient aspiration for God-Light-Freedom-Immortality:

Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.
But all is there, even God’s opposites;
He is a little front of Nature's works,
A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.

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