The English of Savitri: Volume 09 (Book Two - The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds - Cantos Ten and Eleven)

Comments on the language of Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri

— Shraddhavan

		Price: Rs 500 Hard Cover Pages: 252 Dimensions (in cms): 14x22     Publisher: Savitri Bhavan, Auroville ISBN: 978-93-82474-38-8
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About The English of Savitri: Volume 09 (Book Two - The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds - Cantos Ten and Eleven)

Volume Nine in this series on The English of Savitri explores Cantos Ten and Eleven of Book Two. It tells of King Aswapati's entry into the realms of Mind, described in two long cantos entitled respectively “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind” and “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind”. The former canto focuses on picturing the lower planes of mind up to the plane of the reasoning mind, while the latter deals with the higher planes that cannot be circumscribed by mere human thought.

Like the previous volumes, this book is based on the transcripts of classes held at Savitri Bhavan. Its aim remains the same, to read the poetry according to the natural rhythms of English speech and to gain a better understanding and appreciation of Savitri by explaining Sri Aurobindo’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and imagery.

REVIEW

Shraddhavan’s series on The English of Savitri continues in volumes 9 and 10 with its explication of Book Two, “The Traveller of the Worlds”, detailing King Aswapati’s journey through the varied worlds of mind and above into the worlds of spirit and soul and the mystic peaks of knowledge. The effectiveness of Shraddhavan’s approach of focusing on the language of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem – clarifying its complex terminology and turns of phrase, its symbolism and references to legends and myths, and the structure and detailed forms of its grand architecture of spiritual thought and vision – has been described in reviews of previous volumes. One notable feature here is that volume 10 includes a relatively long, forty-two page introduction based on a talk Shraddhavan had given on “The Traveller of the Worlds”, providing an illuminating and contextualising overview of the whole of Book Two. Rather than expanding on issues relating to Shraddhavan’s approach and style, this review will give an overview of the fascinating and relatively abstruse substance of the poem that is covered in these two volumes, utilising selected passages from the poem and illustrating some of the author’s elucidations which help the reader decipher them.

Volume 9 examines Cantos Ten and Eleven of Book Two, titled respectively “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind” and “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind”. The first of these is relatively more accessible to our understanding because it deals with the mind that we are conscious of, though Sri Aurobindo reveals its various facets and underlying dimensions and surprising realities in absolutely unique and captivating images and descriptions. Canto Eleven deals with higher, more remote levels of the spiritual mind that we normally do not have access to, though they do sometimes reveal something of themselves to our mind through intuitions, and more readily cast influences on our minds and lives. It should perhaps be emphasised that for Sri Aurobindo these are not merely impersonal mental powers; the sources of these mental and intuitive perceptions and insights are subtle occult worlds populated with living beings, referred to as godheads in the poem. Although we living in the physical world are more or less blind to their existence, they have relatively free access to us, prompting our thoughts and shaping our lives.

One of the critical insights Sri Aurobindo gives us about the “Little Mind”, associated with our normal mentality, is its paradoxical nature of being on one side extraordinarily inept, narrow, mechanical, earth-bound, prone to error, deluded; and on the other side, a medium and conduit for the higher spiritual consciousness, divine wisdom, and God himself to create and manifest the material world. These characteristics are exemplified in the poet’s descriptions of the various godheads reigning on the different levels of the mind.

Sri Aurobindo illustrates three levels or aspects of the “Little Mind”, by describing the godheads living in these subtle mental worlds. The first represents a part of the mind dominated by our corporality, by the body and materiality. This being is described as

First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,
A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,
A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds
For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.

The second depicts a part of the mind dominated by drives and desires. It is illustrated thus:

   A fiery spirit came, next of the three.
A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,
A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned
From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds
And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.
Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

The third represents a part of the mind associated with reason. This being is described as

Arriving late from a far plane of thought
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
Came, Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge of Time.
Adept of clear contrivance and design,
A pensive face and close and peering eyes,
She took her firm and irremovable seat,
The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.

Sri Aurobindo’s elaborate depictions of these three types of beings and their characteristic nature and action show with stark clarity the different strands of human mentality and its severe limitations. Shraddhavan’s extensive commentary on this section, punctuated with students’ questions and her answers, clarifies the significances of Sri Aurobindo’s fantastic images.

Near the end of the canto, Sri Aurobindo describes a higher part of the mind, above this ‘dwarfish trinity’, / ‘Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is’. As described in the poem and as Shraddhavan amplifies and elaborates in her commentary, these two guiding spirits represent a “Life-Thought” and “A pure Thought-Mind”. Shraddhavan clarifies that these are also parts of the “Little Mind” seated above the physical mind represented by the dwarfish trinity, powerful and luminous aspects rarely obvious in human beings except in the elite vanguard. Of the “Life-Thought” Shraddhavan explains: “it uplifts ‘the laggard world’. It is an ‘Iconoclast’; it shatters all our forms that we believe in”. (151)^[1] Describing the ‘pure thought-mind’, she says that it “makes images and uses abstract thought. It is not influenced at all by the appeals of the life-force or the senses that put us in touch with matter.… And that is watching all the acts of the universe”. (153)

In the canto “Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind”, Sri Aurobindo describes what he calls ‘The splendours of ideal Mind’. Commenting on one of its early passages, Shraddhavan says: “In that vast ‘ideal Space’ all the many different ‘truths’ of the spirit get embodied and ‘take form as living Gods’, and each of those cosmic powers, those truths of the spirit, ‘can build a world in its own right’. This statement makes me think that here the poet is telling us about the Overmind realm.” (168) Contextualising the function of this realm and godheads, she says,

We begin to see perhaps that the function of mind is to connect the levels of pure spirit with the more material levels, the life levels and the physical levels. And to do that, all the freedom of the spirit has to be turned into something that can be connected with matter. The different levels of mind are doing this work progressively. Sri Aurobindo describes these godheads as ‘Creators of Matter by hid stress of Mind’. (208)

The poet describes three levels of this Greater Mind, each with its characteristic godheads. Shraddhavan’s commentary helps to tease apart and define their respective functions. The first is closest to matter; she explains that “[t]heir characteristic is that they mould and measure and give form to the ideas that are coming from higher above”. (207-208) She says that the poet describes them “as ‘The Masters of things actual’ and ‘Creators of Matter’, ‘Archmasons’, highly-skilled head masons”. Shraddhavan contrasts their function with the godheads of the higher, second realm, which the poet describes as ‘high architects of possibility’, ‘engineers of the impossible’, ‘Mathematicians of the infinitudes’, and ‘theoricians of unknowable truths’. (214) Shraddhavan explains that “[t]hey are more subtle, not so much under the domination of earth matter…these beings have a larger power of vision than the ones we read about earlier, and their ‘looks’ are not so much concentrated on matter but search for what is not seen normally, ‘the unseen’”. (213) Regarding the godheads of the third and highest level of this realm, Shraddhavan comments: “They survey, they look out over everything in ‘Space’ and ‘Time’… And on that level, it seems as if there is an ‘all-containing Consciousness’ – very broad, very wide – which is embracing all existence, supporting all existence, supporting ‘Being in a still embrace’. There is a silent, immobile, unmoving ‘Consciousness’ which is supporting all existence”. (228) She further explains that “they make a connection between our ‘world’ and the ‘luminous Unseen’ which is far above and beyond it. Their work is to catch hold of ‘The imperatives of the creator Self’. The Lord gives his fiats, his commands that certain things should happen.” (228-229)

Larry Seidlitz, Ph.D., is a psychologist and scholar focusing on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He is presently associated with the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research (SACAR), where he facilitates online courses on Sri Aurobindo’s teachings. For many years he edited Collaboration, a USA-based journal on the Integral Yoga, and has authored the books Transforming Lives, Integral Yoga at Work, and The Spiritual Evolution of the Soul.