The
following article is based on a presentation made during the Second International
Conference on Integral Psychology, held at Pondicherry (India), 4-7 January
2001. The text has been published in:
Cornelissen, Matthijs (Ed.) (2001) Consciousness and Its Transformation,
Pondicherry: SAICE
Savitri
A key to Sri Aurobindo’s “psycho-cosmology”
Shraddhavan
It had been intended
to hold this afternoon’s session in the garden of Savitri Bhavan, the
institution I am associated with. But unexpected blessings from the Rain
Gods have made us shift here to a more sheltered position. The building
we are sitting in is the Sri Aurobindo World Centre for Human Unity. It
was built with funds received from the Indian Government in connection
with the 125th Birth Anniversary celebrations for Sri Aurobindo.
It is intended to serve as the seed of a centre for Higher Studies and
Research in the light of the vision and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother. So it is very appropriate that we should be here together
this afternoon, and I would like to add my own thanks to the appreciation
that has already been expressed to the organisers and participants of
this Conference. I have found all the presentations stimulating and valuable,
and in what I have to say you are likely to hear some echoes of topics
that have been raised by various speakers over the last days.
As you perhaps know, one aspect of the Mother’s vision of Auroville
was that of a “Universe-City”, a township essentially devoted to unending
education, constant progress, both individual and collective. So far we
have been able to build up a number of schools of different kinds, serving
different target groups of children and youngsters; and there have been
a wide variety of opportunities for informal adult education. But a need
is now being felt for more established resources and structures to support
on-going education, to interconnect the many researchers who are working
independently here, and to enable constructive networking with other –researchers
and research institutions around the world who would be interested in
knowing more about our experiences and in sharing their own with us. So
a proposal is now being prepared for submission to the Government of India,
to request support for setting up such an institution here. Within the
context of that organisation, Savitri Bhavan will serve as the base for
the faculty of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother Studies, focusing especially
on the core-areas of the teachings which lie at the basis of Auroville:
the philosophy, psychology and yoga-practice of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother.
The Savitri Bhavan project has grown up over the last six years,
out of the deep interest that many Aurovilians feel in Sri Aurobindo’s
epic poem Savitri. Amongst all his many
writings, the Mother has given a special place to this work, which she
has characterised as “The supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision”.
As such, Savitri has been read in Auroville from the very earliest
days, both individually and in groups. But in 1994, it was decided to
start a Savitri Study Circle, which would meet not only to read but
also to discuss and explore Savitri together.
And to some of the people in the Circle there came the inspiration that
there should be a place in Auroville which could become an inspiring centre
of Savitri studies, housing all
kinds of materials and activities to enrich our understanding and enjoyment
of Sri Aurobindo’s revelatory epic, and above all, to have a very special
atmosphere. For learning and research in Auroville is meant to be not
purely academic and intellectual. Intellectual learning has its place
and value, but here we would like to place even more emphasis on experiential
learning and research—experiences that can really lead to a change of
consciousness. That is the aim of Savitri Bhavan—it means “The Abode of
Savitri”—which is open not only to Aurovilians but to everyone, from wherever
they come, who has an interest in Savitri
and the teachings of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. And we are fortunate that this project has won
the blessings and support of some of those most closely associated with
them—for example Dr. Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo’s scribe for Savitri; Amal
Kiran, the poet-disciple to whom Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of letters
explaining his intentions and methods in creating Savitri; and
Huta, the young woman whom the Mother trained to work with her on illustrating
Savitri, and who has allowed us access to uniquely illuminating
materials connected with their 18-year long collaboration.
As coordinator for the educational activities of the Bhavan, I have
been invited to make a presentation to you. I am not a psychologist, but
a lay-person with a long-standing interest in psychology, which, as we
have been reminded in the last days, Sri Aurobindo defined as “the science
of consciousness”. And I speak to you today as a follower of Sri Aurobindo
and a child of the Mother. I shall be using their terminology and speaking
from that standpoint because I am not competent to do anything else—and
because I feel this is really the most useful thing I can do. I shall
try to give you a small taste of some of the unique materials that have
been entrusted to our care.
The title of my presentation
perhaps requires a little explanation: Savitri as a Key to
Sri Aurobindo’s psycho-cosmology.
“Psycho-cosmology” is my own coinage—a kind of shorthand term for what
forms the conceptual basis of our research here—a basis which to Sri Aurobindo
himself was of course not “conceptual”, but experienced. This coinage
evokes two aspects that are of cardinal importance in Sri Aurobindo’s
message. While he has explored and revealed the complexities of individual
psychology with unprecedented completeness, he has at the same time linked
our individual psychology with an explanation of the workings of the universe,
giving the human individual a meaningful position in the cosmos.
At the beginning of
Book Two of Savitri the protagonist, King
Aswapati, the father of Savitri, has a vision of the many planes of consciousness
rising like one of the temple towers that we see here in South India,
with many levels, each peopled with their own beings, animals and houses,
rising one above the other up into the sky.
There, walled apart by
its own innerness
In a mystical barrage
of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense
high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain-chariot
of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable
sky.
As if from matter’s plinth
and viewless base
To a top as viewless,
a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned
waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths
immeasureable;
It hoped to soar into
the Ineffable’s reign:
A hundred levels raised
it to the Unknown.
So it towered up to heights
intangible
And disappeared in the
hushed conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed
temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring
soul of man to live
Near to his dream of
the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it
as it dreams and climbs;
Its spire touches the
apex of the world;
Mounting into great voiceless
stillnesses
It marries the earth
to screened eternities.
Amid the many systems
of the One
Made by an interpreting
creative joy
Alone it points us to
our journey back
Out of our long self-loss
in Nature’s deeps;
Planted on earth it holds
in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium
of the Vast.
This was the single stair
to being’s goal.
A summary of the stages
of the spirit
Its copy of the cosmic
hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret
air of self
A subtle pattern of the
universe.
This Canto is entitled
“The World-Stair”.
Its steps are paces of
the soul’s return
From the deep adventure
of material birth,
A ladder of delivering
ascent
And rungs that Nature
climbs to deity.
This refers to the
evolutionary process up out of Matter to higher levels of consciousness.
But before this process began, there was an involution, of consciousness
into the Inconscient:
Once in the vigil of
a deathless gaze
These grades had marked
her giant downward plunge,
The wide a prone leap
of a godhead’s fall.
Elsewhere, this cosmic
hierarchy of planes is described similarly:
Ascending and descending
twixt life’s poles
The seried kingdoms of
the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting
into Time,
Then glad of a glory
of multitudinous mind
And rich with life’s
adventure and delight
And packed with the beauty
of Matter’s shapes and hues
Climbed back from Time
into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carying
the soul,
Tying with diamond threads
the Spirit’s extremes.
In this drop from consciousness
to consciousness
Each leaned on the occult
Inconscient’s power,
The fountain of its needed
Ignorance,
Archmason of the limits
by which it lives.
In this soar from consciousness
to consciousness
Each lifted tops to That
from which it came,
Origin of all that it
had ever been
And home of all that
it could still become. (p. 88-89)
We can see something
of this in one of the many illustrations which the Mother prepared for
Savitri. This drawing was made around 1964 or 65, when the
Mother was working with a young woman in the Ashram, Huta, on a project
of illustrating selected passages from Savitri. The
Mother herself was a very accomplished artist. She studied art in Paris
in the 1880s. Her first husband was a painter, and she personally knew
many of the famous names of that time, including Monet, Rodin, and Rouault.
She encouraged many artists in the Ashram, and she told Huta that she
was training her for a new kind of painting that would be able to express
subtler levels of consciousness. The Mother herself has explained how
they worked, saying:
Savitri, this prophetic
vision of the world’s history, including the announcement of the earth’s
future,—Who can ever dare to put it in pictures?
Yet, the Mother and Huta have tried it, this way. “We simply meditate
together on the lines chosen, and when the image becomes clear, I describe
it with the help of a few strokes, then Huta goes to her studio and brushes
the painting.”
It is in a meditative
mood that these “meditations” must be looked at to find the feeling they
contain behind their appearance.
This particular picture
is a diagram of twelve different planes of consciousness, from the Inconscient
at the bottom, up through the body, life and mind planes, followed by
the four planes of what Sri Aurobindo calls Higher Mind, then Overmind,
the plane of the Gods, and above that the planes of Ananda, Chit-Tapas,
and Sat, which mark the limit of the Manifestation. Beyond is the Unmanifest.
When preparing this drawing as an aid to Huta the Mother explained to
her that those who have intuited the Unmanifest have often spoken of it
as “the Void”, and thought of it as empty. But, she said, it is not empty.
It is in fact packed with potentiality. What Sri Aurobindo has done, she
explained, is to go into that realm of unmanifest potentialities, to seize
and bring down into the manifestation a completely new possibility—the
Supermind, the principle of a New Creation.
The Mother explained too that she perceived these successive planes
of existence as qualities of light, each with its distinctive colour.
But expressing these qualities of light in pigment, in paint was not easy.
Huta had to make many successive attempts before the Mother pronounced
herself reasonably satisfied with the result.
These planes are levels of universal manifestation. But in the passage
from Savitri which we have noted,
Sri Aurobindo tells us that, through the involution, all of them have
contributed to and become part of the earth we live on, and that they
are accessible to human experience. Individually we can experience them
in our innermost self, if we become aware enough; and eventually, through
the process of evolution, the whole creation has to climb back up the
stair of existence and recover its origin. So far we have attained only
the Mind level. The best is all to come.
We may note several
important points which follow from this vision of man’s place in the cosmos:
— In Sri Aurobindo’s
world-view consciousness is primary. He has referred to Matter as “sense
created mould of Spirit”. In fact each of these planes corresponds to
a mode of consciousness, and a relation between what Indian philosophy
refers to as Purusha and Prakriti, or Chit and Shakti ... conscious awareness,
and the expressive force of that consciousness.
— The complementary
relation of involution and evolution implies that evolution has direction
and purpose. It is not just a chance configuration of original plasma
that has somehow accidentally given rise to the anomalous appearance of
organised Matter, burgeoning Life, and inexplicable Mind. These are the
external signs of an inner drive towards ever more complex and delightful
forms in which Spirit or Consciousness may express itself, experience
itself, recognise and enjoy itself.
— Each individuality
is a projection, a partial expression of some divine uniqueness, which
in the involution becomes “ego”. Dr. George Matthew showed us the other
day that as individuals we can be considered to be constantly co-existent
on all planes from the Supreme to unconscious matter, and that the process
of self-realisation means recovering identity with the Origin and Source
of which we are projections. But Sri Aurobindo tells us that we do not
have to lose our individuality when we re-attain the level of original
consciousness. To do so we have to lose our distorted ego sense; but since
our true Source is some quality of divine potentiality, we can choose
to retain a true individuality for action in the world, even when united
in consciousness with the Source.
— Evolution takes place,
starting from the Inconscient, both individually, with the development
of the psychic being, and generally in Nature, which manifests new forms,
species, corresponding to the levels of consciousness generally attained;
and both individual and group and Nature in general are equally expressions
of the involved Divine. Everything in Nature, including inconscient Matter
and every life-movement, is essentially divine, and can, when the process
of evolution is complete, express the divine Will and Delight.
These points give
Sri Aurobindo’s world-vision its special dynamic and optimistic character.
This “psycho-cosmology” is the consistent basis of all Sri Aurobindo’s
major writings. In his different books he has dealt with various areas
of interest: English literature, Indian culture, world history, human
society, and so on. In most of them he has spoken the language of the
intellect, and set out to answer the human mind’s need for rational conviction.
This is because, from the individual point of view, any means which helps
us to come into contact with our true individuality is helpful, and progressive
from the evolutionary standpoint; in human beings, since the human race
is representative of Mind in this evolutionary process, the intelligent
will is “the priest of the sacrifice”.
But for most of us the
intelligent will is driven not merely, not even primarily, by reason and
intellect. All the other planes of being act on us too. Very dominant
in our ordinary psychology are the vital or life planes. Their principle,
though in us often distorted by ego and desire, is Delight. And the response
to and quest for Beauty is one of the very powerful motives which can
help to carry us beyond our limited ego-selves towards a wider and higher
identification. In one of his aphorisms, Sri Aurobindo says,
If mankind could but
see though in a glimpse of fleeting experience what infinite enjoyments,
what perfect forces, what –luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge,
what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our
animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never
rest till they had gained these treasures.
Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human,
p. 423
Art and Beauty in
all forms can be, and have been, ways of linking our ordinary human mentality
with higher, intensified states.
While the Mother was
a painter and musician, Sri Aurobindo was a poet. In the Essays on the Gita, he has contrasted the language of the Gita, which
is designed to satisfy, he says, an intellectual difficulty, to that of
the Upanishads with
... its free resort to
image and symbol, its intuitive form of speech in which the hard limiting
definiteness of intellectual utterance is broken down and the implications
of words are allowed to roll out in an illimitable wave of suggestion
...
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, p. 264
in an attempt to evoke the highest spiritual
truth, which can be lived, can be seen, but can only be partially suggested.
We can make a similar
comparison between The Life Divine, which for many years was Sri Aurobindo’s
“best-seller”, and Savitri, which has overtaken it in popularity over
the last decade or so. One gentleman expressed what many have confirmed,
when he explained that while both works present intellectual difficulties,
he found that the music and suggestive images of Savitri had a very remarkable
effect on him, even though he felt that he was not understanding them.
In fact they gave some glimpse of those future states lying ahead of us.
Sri Aurobindo in fact
was aiming, as he has explained in The Future Poetry, for a level of linguistic expression that could be termed “mantric”. Since
this theme was touched upon in an earlier session, I would like to conclude
by adding a few reflections of my own on this topic.
That sound-waves have
physical effects is now generally accepted and scientifically demonstrated.
A moment’s reflection will convince us that sound waves in the form of
words can have powerful mental and emotional effects on human beings—and
that these may lead to consequent physical effects. This applies whether
the words are heard physically through the ear, or only subtly in the
mind.
It therefore does not seem irrational to accept that sound waves
in the form of mantra—words
uttered with a conscious intent by a being who is in a heightened state
of consciousness and possesses a capacity of powerful mental formation—may
have effects on a hearer that extend to several different levels of consciousness—mental,
vital, physical and “spiritual”.
For mantra-japa to have a lasting effect on the physical consciousness
and the body, constant repetition over a long period may be needed. But
many sensitive people can attest that simply hearing the Mother’s voice
reciting lines from Savitri can
have a remarkable effect, that is at the very least both delightful and
uplifting. So let us close by hearing a recording of her reading of a
few of the lines quoted above, from Canto One of Book Two, accompanied
by some music of the Ashram composer, Sunil Bhattacharya.