Sri Aurobindo is interested in the legend of soul, and his poetry is a quest after the life divine. His plays and poems are something analogous to the Vedic mantras and are full of mystic visions, thoughts, themes, experiences and symbols. Like Blake he hears the whispers of eternity and has tried to contain Infinity within his palm “Joan of Arc heard heavenly voices, Aurobindo probably saw heavily visions,” says Dr. Iyengar. Other poets may be mystic, but Aurobindo is both a Yogi and a Poet. His mysticism, therefore, is no mere wordy exercise, but something felt in the blood and felt along the heart.
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| Mysticism in Aurobindo’s Savitri |
V.N. Bhushan in his book The Peacock Lute (1945) has pertinently observed: “Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a type by itself - poetry of the highest and rarest kind the poetry of mystic vision, magical word and mantric vibration. It is not simply poetry of the Yoga or the poetry of austerity revelling in recondite thought, reeling expression and serpentine movement. Born out of deep spiritual experience and self – realization, Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a call to spiritual adventure.”
Sri Aurobindo once remarked that “Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure.” It is an epic of soul, a quest of spirit to free itself from ignorance, and death. It is ‘eternity in words’. In the words of Dr. Iyengar it is a “death transcending” and “life - rehabilitation Epic of the Dawn” Sri Shiv Dass regards Savitri as “the Super - Epic - Yoga Shastra”. Mrs. Premanand Kumar calls it a poem “swathed in the robes of Vedantic metaphysics” and adds that Savitri is “a manual of yoga, embodying stairs and spirals of spiritual aspiration involving trails and struggles, doubts, and difficulties, but culminating in the summits and high - mountain lakes of spiritual victory and realisation.” Her father, Dr. Iyengar observes: Savitri “is a vision, experience and realisation in term of poetry, and only a seer who had achieved a purposive involvement in the totality of experience and comprehended the structure of the Cosmos could have ventured to reconstitute the realm of end and means in the way Sri Aurobindo has done in this poem.” Prof. Narasimhaiah has gone to the extent of observing: “If poetry is a mode of meditation, dhyanmantra, you find it here”.
Savitri is the poetic expression of rishi Aurobindo's Divine Vision, his yogic sadhna and his Integral Yoga. He has endeavoured to synthesize the three trends of the most authoritative ancient philosophical systems of Vedanta: the Dvaita, the Advaita and the Vishisthadvaita. Hence the name of his teachings is “Integral Vedanta” or “integral Yoga”. According to his philosophy, Brahman is ubiquitous, everything has its origin in Brahman and everything returns to Him; He is cosmos, in nature and in human being. There is no life or death, but there is transformation of soul, the aim of human being is ‘Divine Life’, and the way to it is through self - knowledge and through spiritual self - perfection. The divine consciousness, according to Ghose, lies dormant in every human being which it is possible to awaken and must be awakened. This awakening in oneself of the Divine origin constitutes self - knowledge. If all the people reach that stage, they will then know God, merge with Brahman, and “Divine Life” will befall them.
From the thematic, philosophical, purposive, descriptive and characterization points of view, Savitri is a piece of mystic poetry. Its symbolism further entitles it to mystichood. Aswapathy's and Savitri's yogas are Aurobindo's as well as of every man's and woman's of the whole human race. What is true of Aswapathy is also true of Sri Aurobindo to a great extent:
His is a search of darkness for the Light,
Of mortal life for immortality. Book I Canto 4
Aswapathy's journeys in the “World - Stairs” and Savitri's entry into the “inner countries” are on the pattern of the journey of the human soul through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in Dante's Divine Comedy. “But whereas Dante is religious, theological and mediaeval (though modern enough for his time).” Sri Aurobindo is spiritual, scientific and modern. Sri Aurobindo has excelled Dante in one more sense. He does not catalogue sins and pigeonholes them in Hell's circles and Purgatory's slopes - rather he traces the lines of descent of consciousness from Spirit to Matter and the corresponding lines of ascent of consciousness from Matter to Spirit.
Reading through Savitri is journeying through the mystic occult worlds or going on a cosmic conducted tour, starting with the occult regions of Gross Matter, Subtle Matter and Material Paradise- “moving to the realms of the Little Life inhabited by Insects, Animals and Primitive Man, and then to the Kingdom of the Morning Star peopled by rajasic heroes cast on a mighty mould - then dropping as in a downward moving “lift” into the nether worlds of the Mother of Falsehood and the Sons of Darkness, and anon, out of this dark this gloom this hell, alone a tunnel to the bright light of the Gandharva World of the Life – Gods, and then following a ladder of ascent, to the worlds of the Little and the Greater Mind covering the whole range from the first glimmering of thought to highest illuminations of the intuitive mind, and winging still higher to the immaculate world of the Rose and the Flame, leading at last to the regions of sovereigns Silence and of the mystic rule of the dual power of Purusha and Prakrit. Even the long Book of the “Traveller of the Worlds”, running to nearly 7500 lines, is a self - contained epic within the larger epic frame of Savitri, a poetic encyclopedia of occult knowledge and experience. The characters of the epic are no mere human figures but sadhaks or avatars. Aswapathy is the conscious soul of the world or of humanity or of an individual sadhak aspiring for union with the Eternal, for the removal of ignorance. Savitri as a human being is a sadhak aspiring for victory of life over death, of immortality over mortality. As a divine avatar, she is Shakti, or the Divine Mother. Satyavan too is Truth, an embodiment of truth whom ignorance and nascence in the form of Lord of Death wants to kill.
The theme of Savitri is eternity. It is man's fundamental problem of attaining immortality or salvation. In mystical terms the theme is
Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death
Or hew the ways of Immortality..........
Aswapathy's intellectual and spiritual unease, his aspiration for the world, redemption from the iron laws of desire, frustration and death, his ascent into the Secret Knowledge, his Yoga of the Soul's release and the Spirit's freedom and greatness, his tapasya of exploration of the occult ‘World's Stair’, his pilgrimage to the Unknowable and his securing from her the boon of the coming of Savitri as redeemer of the “Soul of the Worlds” (called Satyavan) now under the doom of unappeasable Death—all this gives the epic a mystic colour.
Aswapathy's yoga falls into three parts. First, he is achieving his own spiritual self - fulfilment of the King. Next, he makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation. This is described in the book of Divine Mother. Book I deals with the “Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness.” Aswapathy indeed is a “colonist from immortality.” He can see that body is not everything and breaking out of it he grows into his larger self, and the transcendental realisations come to him in due course.
If in the course of his Yoga, Aswapathy becomes a sojourner in the ‘World –Stair’, Savitri likewise makes an entry into the “inner countries”. As mentioned by Dr. Iyengar, “There is a seeking and a self - finding in both, there are dialectical battles in both, there are the marvels of the world within worlds of consciousness in both - heights above heights, depths below depths, caverns within caverns .......” Even as Aswapathy comes to know that
……..all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
Savitri too sees in her vision:
A vast subliminal is man's measureless past.
The dim subcontinent is his cavern base...........
Out of the Inconscient and subliminal
Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light
And strive to know and master a dubious world
Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.
Above us dwells a super conscient god
Hidden in the mystery of his own light:
Around us is a vast of ignorance
Lit by the uncertain ray of the human mind.
Below us sleeps the inconscient dark and mute ....
Belief in God and soul's longing to unite with God are the sumum bonum of all mystic poetry. Aurobindo's Savitri in every nook and corner evinces the presence of God and soul's strong desire to merge with the Maker. Throughout the whole of this holy epic one feels the pulsating presence of God— the One, the Perfect, the Divine, For instance, mark a few instances:
1. Then by a touch, a presence or a voice
The world is turned into a temple ground
And all discloses the unknown Beloved — Book II Canto 12
2. The Immanent lives in man as in his house. — Book I, Canto 4
3. God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God. —Book I, Canto 3
4. And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.— Book II, Canto 5
5. He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.
6. He is the Maker, and the world he made,
He is the vision, and he is the seer; He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known — Book I, Canto 4
Rightly, therefore, Savitri can be called “the songs of life divine in which human will find its fulfilment. It sees the spirit, the divine, the supreme who is Absolute that by a graded, self - regulated descent from its realms of highest infinities of knowledge, consciousness and bliss descends creating at each step of its descent a universe that manifests its glory.” And the Mother is right in regarding it as a super - epic where poetry and metaphysics reach culmination. It is a poem full of Vedic symbolism and Upanishadic mysticism.
As a mystic poet Sri Aurobindo's status is supreme and unique. Herbert has a religious simplicity at once piquant and passionate; Crashaw a rich sensuousness kindling into spirituality; Donne a nervous intricate power troubling the Unknown; Vaughan a half - obscure, half bright straining beyond thought into mystical vision; Patmore a pointed polished ardour of the intellect for the veiled Wonder; Francis Thompson a restless and crowded and colourful heat of response to ‘the many - splendoured Thing”. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley are able only to flutter their wings in the sky of the Infinite but they never reach Eternity. Yeats is too occult; Eliot too intellectual and pedantic and Blake too simple to reach the heights of Gnosticism. Other poets, including Tagore, are capable of dealing with one or two mystic planes. But Sri Aurobindo deals with all of them - occult, psychic and spiritual. We can reach Sri Aurobindo's mystical heights to some extent by changing some of his mantric lines and let us chant them, mute and aloud, sleeping or walking.
I would hear in my spirit's wideness solitary
The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute:
I seek the wonder of things absolute
Born form the silence of Eternity
Or
I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmos way intrude,
Obscure in the depths and on the height sublime.
Evolving from the worm into the god.
Ved Vyas, Balmiki, Kalidas, Homer Hesiod, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante and Goethe are of Aurobindo's lineage in sublimity, but none of them is a Yogi like Aurobindo's a poet, a philosopher, a prophet, a seer and a sage and probably posterity may regard Sri Aurobindo as an avtar whose songs and poems are the roses of God and who declares:
I caught the echoes of a word supreme,
And metred the rhythm - beats of infinity
And listen through music for the eternal voice.