PRISMA Audio Books

King Aswapathy is climbing Nature’s Giant Stair and the first place he comes to is the Kingdom of Subtle Matter This is the plane in the creation which Mother and Sri Aurobindo usually call The Subtle Physical. It is the world closest to the physical, material world in which we live every day. This world is the place where the soul first “touches ground” when it returns from its rest between lives. Here it “puts on matter’s cloak”, and when its life is over, it sheds mortality’s cloak on its way back to becoming pure spirit to wait for its next life. It is the ground of nature’s worlds and everything that happens here has its origin there. Sri Aurobindo did not write much about the subtle physical. Usually it is listed along with the other planes and it doesn’t even get a sentence to itself. Here in Savitri, Book II, Canto II, we have his most complete description of the Subtle Physical.

The great yogi-king Aswapathy starts on his inner journey through the planes and parts of his own being, which are also the planes and parts of the Creation itself. He is on his way to creation’s centre to find the Divine Mother and ask her help for humanity and the world. In Book I, he reached place where the heights of mortal effort end, and he received what he needed to be able to travel on. Now that his work for his own spiritual self-fulfillment is done, his journey is for humanity and the earth. He travels on, bearing the burden of the world’s desire, and he sees a high world pile which is the single stair to being’s goal. “A figure sole on Nature’s giant stair, he mounted towards an indiscernible end on the bare summit of created things.”