Golden Bridge

Savitri - CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release 25-26-27

A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.

For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above.

In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day

A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;

The conscious ends of being went rolling back:

The landmarks of the little person fell,

The island ego joined its continent.

Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:

Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown.

Abolished were conception’s covenants

And, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause,

Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience.

All the grey inhibitions were torn off

And broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid;

Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room;

An empyrean vision saw and knew;

The bounded mind became a boundless light,

The finite self mated with infinity.

His march now soared into an eagle’s flight.

Out of apprenticeship to Ignorance

Wisdom upraised him to her master craft

And made him an archmason of the soul,

A builder of the Immortal’s secret house,

An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:

Freedom and empire called to him from on high;

Above mind’s twilight and life’s star-led night

There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: (Section 1 later)

At last the traveller in the paths of Time

Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

In the transient symbol of humanity draped,

He feels his substance of undying self

And loses his kinship to mortality.

A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,

His thought stretches into infinitude;

All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.

His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul,

His life is oceaned by that superlife.

He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds;

A topless Supernature fills his frame:

She adopts his spirit’s everlasting ground

As the security of her changing world

And shapes the figure of her unborn mights.

Immortally she conceives herself in him,

In the creature the unveiled Creatrix works:

Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes;

Her being is his through a vast identity.

Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.

A static Oneness and dynamic Power

Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals;

His soul and body take that splendid stamp.

A long dim preparation is man’s life,

A circle of toil and hope and war and peace

Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.

In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,

He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame

A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,

A search for something or someone never found,

Cult of an ideal never made real here,

An endless spiral of ascent and fall

Until at last is reached the giant point

Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made

And we break into the infinity of God.

Across our nature’s border line we escape

Into Supernature’s arc of living light.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: Section 1 early

His days were a long growth to the Supreme.

A skyward being nourishing its roots

On sustenance from occult spiritual founts

Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.

His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,

His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,

His will a hunter in the trails of light.

An ocean impulse lifted every breath;

Each action left the footprints of a god,

Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.

The little plot of our mortality

Touched by this tenant from the heights became

A playground of the living Infinite.

This bodily appearance is not all;

The form deceives, the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Artist of his own beauty and delight,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea

Determining predestined shape and act,

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

He regards the icon growing by his gaze

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

Savitri: Book 2 Canto 14 Section 1

The silent Soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

A single Person who was himself and all

And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs

Transfigured into beats divine and pure.

One who could love without return for love,

Meeting and turning to the best the worst,

It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,

Transforming all experience to delight;

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

It led things evil towards their secret good,

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Its power was to reveal divinity.

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

All grew to all kindred and self and near;

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration’s single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love.

An inner happiness abode in all,

A sense of universal harmonies,

A measureless secure eternity

Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.

Here was the welling core of finite life;

A formless spirit became the soul of form.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1

O Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks,

No soul is thy companion in the light;

Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.

What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.

O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,

O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world,

How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,

Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s home

Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?

I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,

I am the goal of the travail of the suns;

My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.

But too immense my danger and my joy.

Awake not the immeasurable descent,

Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;

Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight.

Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.

Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way:

In thy single vast achievement reign apart

Helping the world with thy great lonely days.

I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame

In the Immobile’s wide uncaring bliss,

Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,

Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,

Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.

How shall thy mighty spirit brook repose

While Death is still unconquered on the earth

And Time a field of suffering and pain?

Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;

Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:

Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,

For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 3 (very beginning)

“O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power.

A limitless Mind that can contain the world,

A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms

Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.

All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;

Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,

Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;

The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,

The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,

Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,

Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,

Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s sword

And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”

Savitri: Book 4 Canto 3 Section 1

“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,

O petty adventurers in an infinite world

And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,

How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind

Around your little self and petty things?

But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,

Not for vain repetition were you built;

Out of the Immortal’s substance you were made;

Your actions can be swift revealing steps,

Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.

A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,

The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,

Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.

A greater destiny waits you in your front:

This transient earthly being if he wills

Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.

He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes

Hardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,

That look at images and not at Truth,

Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.

Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,

You shall awake into the spirit’s air

And feel the breaking walls of mortal mind

And hear the message which left life’s heart dumb

And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids

And blow your conch-shells at the Eternal’s gate.

Authors of earth’s high change, to you it is given

To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul

And touch the mighty Mother stark awake

And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh

And make of life the million-bodied One.

The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven

The life you lead conceals the light you are.

Book 1, Canto II, p. 14-15-16

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple-door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.

A wide self-giving was her native act;

A magnanimity as of sea or sky

Enveloped with its greatness all that came

And gave a sense as of a greatened world:

Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.

As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,

Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,

And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,

In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose

One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,

Recover the lost habit of happiness,

Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,

And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:

Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,

Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath

Spiritual that can make all things divine.

For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

At once she was the stillness and the word,

A continent of self-diffusing peace,

An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;

The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

In her he found a vastness like his own,

His high warm subtle ether he refound

And moved in her as in his natural home.

In her he met his own eternity.

Savitri: Book 1, Canto 2 Section 1

An absolute supernatural darkness falls

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

An hour arrives when fail all Nature’s means;

Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

And flung back on his naked primal need,

He at length must cast from him his surface soul

And be the ungarbed entity within:

That hour had fallen now on Savitri.

A point she had reached where life must be in vain

Or, in her unborn element awake,

Her will must cancel her body’s destiny.

For only the unborn spirit’s timeless power

Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time.

Only the Self that builds this figure of self

Can rase the fixed interminable line

That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,

These new oblivious personalities

And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts

The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,

Disown the legacy of our buried selves,

The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms

Accepted blindly by the body and soul.

An episode in an unremembered tale,

Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed,

A once living story has prepared and made

Our present fate, child of past energies.

The fixity of the cosmic sequences

Fastened with hidden inevitable links

She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force

Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road,

Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

Savitri: Book VII, Canto II The parable of the search for the Soul (p.475-76-77)

The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?

Or is this all for thy being born on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A listener to the voices of the years,

A follower of the footprints of the gods,

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man’s spirit from unalterable Fate?

Cam’st thou not down to open the doors of Fate,

The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,

And lead man to Truth’s wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to eternity?

Is this then the report that I must make,

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal’s seat, —

His power he kindled in thy body has failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?”

Then Savitri’s heart fell mute, it spoke no word.

But holding back her troubled rebel heart,

Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill,

Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,

Its peak immutable above mind’s air,

A Power within her answered the still Voice:

“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

Open God’s door, enter into his trance.

Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain

His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight:

In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,

Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,

In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;

All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”

Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat,

Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

A statue of the fire of the inner sun.

In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed,

Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

Impassive mid the movement and the cry,

Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

She looked into herself and sought for her soul.