PRISMA Audio Books

The Traveller is moving deeper into the world of the Night of Life’s fall now that she is in the Inconscience of our physical matter. He has looked beyond Nature’s visible face and seen the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance, the evil guarded at the roots of life, and the source of the world’s lasting pain. He has seen the fatal influence upon creatures that came from Night’s Grey Mask. He has traversed the first world that is under these influences and now he enters the place which is under the rule of Ego and Falsehood, and then he experiences a place of even greater darkness. Sri Aurobindo explains how to traverse these worlds which those on the upward way have to know, because “Daring Hell’s kingdoms winds the heavenly route.” In his Letters On Yoga he also tells us how to get beyond the influences of these worlds. In this part of Savitri he is speaking of things that one can recognize throughout the course of history, and also in the world around us today.

The Traveller starts his descent into Night to learn the secret of Life’s wide world-failure. He looked behind Nature’s visible face and the veil was rent that covers Natures depths. He saw the fount of the world’s lasting pain and the fatal whispers of grey carved Mask of Night. He saw Life’s beauty and her gold sunlight, but saw too the dreadful Powers that drive her moods. Sri Aurobindo tells us the mystic truth of the source of darkness that makes progress into a purveyor of death. Then he brings us into the first place where people are ruled and influenced by falsehood and truth is exiled.

The Traveller of the worlds is ready to leave the Greater Life. Here Life cannot stop creating but she is not able to fulfill her real purpose. In this kingdom Life lacks the wisdom that sets the spirit free even though the beings in the Kingdom of the Greater Life have achieved something of the life of the soul. The wide soul of the Traveller-King asks a deeper joy than Life can give here. He moves endlessly in the endless labyrinth of her creations at this level of the manifestation and cannot even find an escape-door of spiritual sight. Life has no issue, Death brings no release; there is no end of dying and return. Until Life has found itself, it cannot cease.

The King follows in Life’s fine and mighty trails, seeking to learn the secret of her soul. All he became that she was or longed to be. A witness overmastered by his scene, he admired her splendid front of pomp and play and her rich and delicate craft. He thrilled to the insistance of her cry. He bore her might, felt her will, her hands of fate, her touch that moves and her power that sei4ze and drive. But he also saw her soul that wept within, her seekings vain, her heart that captures not the one Beloved. Finally Life is not satisfied with Life, nor is the King. In all of Life’s rich and complex music, alone the God-given hymn escapes her her art.

The King travels through the region where beings are what we strive to be. They follow their inner law and wage war either for heaven or for hell. Whatever fate may do to them they have earned. Something they have done, something they have been, they live. There matter is the soul’s result, not its cause .Being felt being even when afar and consciousness replied to consciousness, yet the ultimate oneness was not there. By mysteries they explained a Mystery. A riddling answer met the riddle of things. As the King moved in this space, himself became a riddle to himself. He followed in Life’s fine and mighty trails in a perilous adventure without close.

The Mother and Divine Creatrix, who is the Greater Life and builds and inspires the Greater Life, does everything only to attract and keep her eternal Lover, the Master of Existence. Here Sri Aurobindo calls her ‘this Greatness”. On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same; of every fate she takes her mighty part. Time is her road of endless pilgrimage. This Greatness creates a larger world of greater life with embodied beings who live not by the body or in outward things: a deeper living was their seat of self. This region borders on our mortal state.

The Traveller entered the very first manifestation of the worlds of the Greater Life. The Greater Life first emerged as a magic place of dreams and hopes and promises of charm and delight which never yet become true. Then came the Kingdom of The Morning Star and the throb of promise of a greater life and something seemed to be achieved at last. This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes. All that we seek for is prefigured there.

The Traveller is moving towards the end of the little life and Sri Aurobindo speaks of the greater future that awaits when our soul awakens and we learn at last who lives unseen within us. The Little Life is only a provisional scheme; A false appearance sketched by a limiting mind and sense. When the Traveller first came to the Godheads of the Little Life, he plunged his gaze into the sea of mist to see the small vital beings lurking and working there. On his way out of the mist, traveling in the wounded gloom, he shore his way through the astral chaos like one who walks without a guide, treading a soil that failed beneath his feet.

Sri Aurobindo describes our little life today when we live only for ourselves, wanting only outward things, while our immortal soul, our psychic being sleeps unknown and unfelt within us. As long as the intellect’s outward gazing sight serves earthly interest and creative joys, an incurable littleness pursues our days. The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth. Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall. This is the ephemeral creature’s daily life.

Sri Aurobindo gives us an experience of the creation of the Cosmos from the time Spirit became Matter. A mass phenomenon of visible shapes appeared in the eternal Consciousness. Being was an inert substance driven by Force. God sits, unknown, behind everything and, slowly, very slowly, as life was born in matter, helpless and indistinct came pleasure and pain, trembling with the first faint thrills of a World-Soul. Nature made a thinking body from chemic cells. She turned her dreams towards some high unknown. A quick celestial flash could sometimes come to uplift heart and flesh.