Savitri: Book 7 Canto 6 Section 2

This mind is a dynamic small machine

Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,

With raw material drawn from the outside world,

The patterns sketched out by an artist God.

Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares

Admitted by a silent office gate

And passed through the subconscient’s galleries,

Then issued in Time’s mart as private make.

For now they bear the living person’s stamp;

A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

All else is Nature’s craft and this too hers.

Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;

Nothing is all our own that we create:

The Power that acts in us is not our force.

The genius too receives from some high fount

Concealed in a supernal secrecy

The work that gives him an immortal name.

The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace

Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;

A sample from the laboratory of God

Of which he holds the patent upon earth,

Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;

He listens for Inspiration’s postman knock

And takes delivery of the priceless gift

A little spoilt by the receiver mind

Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;

When least defaced, then is it most divine.

Although his ego claims the world for its use,

Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;

Nature does most in him, God the high rest:

Only his soul’s acceptance is his own.

This independent, once a power supreme,

Self-born before the universe was made,

Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature’s serf

Till he becomes her freedman—or God’s slave.

This is the appearance in our mortal front;

Our greater truth of being lies behind:

Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,

But only when we break through Matter’s wall

In that spiritual vastness can we stand

Where we can live the masters of our world

And mind is only a means and body a tool.

For above the birth of body and of thought

Our spirit’s truth lives in the naked self

And from that height, unbound, surveys the world.

Out of the mind she rose to escape its law

That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self

Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.

High she attained and stood from Nature free

And saw creation’s life from far above,

Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will

To dedicate it to God’s timeless calm:

Then all grew tranquil in her being’s space,

Only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell

Like quiet waves upon a silent sea

Or ripples passing over a lonely pool

When a stray stone disturbs its dreaming rest.

Yet the mind’s factory had ceased to work,

There was no sound of the dynamo’s throb,

There came no call from the still fields of life.

Then even those stirrings rose in her no more;

Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room

Or like a peaceful landscape without sound.

This men call quietude and prize as peace.