Canto Six

Nirvana and the Discovery of the

All-Negating Absolute

A CALM slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens.

The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods

And the great blue enchantment of the sky

Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats

The night's gold treasure of autumnal moons

And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's;

Although her kingdom of marvellous change within

All that lived round her felt its magic's charm:

Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,

The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.

The mild ascetics of the wood received

This bright perfection of her inner state

Made beautiful dull common natural things

Even the smallest meanest work became

An offering to the self of the great world

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Her heart-beats' dance communicated bliss:

And grief some solace found when she drew near.

She saw not now Fate's dark and lethal orb;

Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight

In her visions and deep-etched veridical dreams,

He lay not by a dolorous decree

Or borne to blissful regions far from her

Forgetting the passionate oneness of love's clasp,

Always he was with her, a living soul

A living body near to her body's joy.

In kinship with the days of bird and beast

But mid the thinking high-built lives of men

In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,

Body to body near, soul near to soul,

They were tied in the single circling of their days

Inseparable like the earth and sky.

This was the sun before abysmal Night.

Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse,

Still quivering from her lover's strong embrace,

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An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;

It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.

A formless Dread with shapeless endless wings

A denser darkness than the Night could bear,

A rolling surge of silent death, it came

Effacing heaven with its enormous stride

And end the fable of the joy of life.

Abolishing all by which her nature lived,

A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,

A person and a black infinity.

The message of its dark eternity

Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,

Imagined by some blind regardless self,

Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,

A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart

In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought

"Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,

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The illusion of thy soul's reality

In the animal body of imperfect man?

And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word

Transcending the mute Superconscient's realm,

Or for a sanction to thy heart's delight

Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,

And sit with God tasting a human joy.

I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,

I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.

And slay the will to live, the joy to be

And only abide the eternal and absolute.

All else is shadow and flash in Mind's bright glass,

A splendid figure of its own false self

O soul, inventor of man's thoughts and hopes,

Illusion's centre or subtle apex point,

A shadow of the negating Absolute,

And ebbed in her the formidable Voice.

A barren silence weighed upon her heart,

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Awaiting the unknown eternal Will.

The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,

The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven's reply,

"O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;

Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues

Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self

Till of a vaster empire it grows part.

Content abide not with one conquered realm;

To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme

Accept to be small and human on the earth,

That man may find his utter self in God.

An immortal spirit into the mortal's world,

In the Inconscient's realm one shining star,

Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,

To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,

If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,

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Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;

He who would save the world must share its pain.

If far he walks above mortality's head,

If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks,

God must be born on earth and be as man

He who would save the world must be one with the world,

And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.

And feel eternity as its very stuff,

Know itself older than the birth of Time,

Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire

The world's destruction a small transient storm

If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,

Thy mind's selection from the Infinite,

Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.

Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable

Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce;

Find the hid Truth in things seen null and false,

Thou shalt be one with God's bare reality

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And the diviner miracle still to be

Translucent grows to the Eternal's light,

And life is filled with a spiritual joy

Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time's work,

Annul thyself that only God may be."

Thus spoke the mighty and uplifting Voice,

And Savitri heard; she bowed her head and mused

In her soul's privacy in the silent Night.

A witness of the drama of herself,

She watched the passion and the toil of life

The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts.

Calling, compelling nought, forbidding nought,

And the free initiative of Nature's will.

She heard the prompter's voice behind the scenes,

And the organ theme of the composer Force.

The animal instincts prowling mid life's trees,

And passion's thunder-chase sweeping the nerves;

And the wordless Light that liberates the soul.

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She paused not to survey the official case,

Its factory of thought-sounds and soundless words

Its mint and treasury of shining coin.

A gramophone's discs, a reproduction's film,

In our unseen subtle body thought is born

Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought

Or from her heart emerged some burning face

Aspired to heaven or embraced the world

Across the dull sky of man's common days,

To the celestial beauty of faith gave form,

Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.

Compelled the forward stride, the upward look,

And life grew marvellous with transfiguring hope.

Thoughts, glistening Angels, stood behind the brain

And poured heaven's rays into the earthly form.

Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy

Around her navel lotus clustering close

Streamed their dumb movements of the unformed Idea;

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They brought their mute unuttered resonances

Below, desires formed their wordless wish,

Translated into the accents of a cry

Her body's thoughts climbed from her conscious limbs

Where Nature's murmurs meet the Ineffable.

All must present their passports at its door;

Or pass as manufactures of the brain,

Only to the inner mind they speak direct,

Their passage seen, their message heard and known,

And stand confessed to an immortal's sight,

Impenetrable, withheld from mortal sense,

Disclosed to her their happenings and their guests;

And through the secrecy of unseen doors

Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,

Or peered through the finite at the infinite.

And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not,

The blissful sweetness of the intangible's touch;

Are there the stuff of daily experience

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The beings of the subtle realms appeared

She saw the life of remote continents

She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;

The great world's thoughts were part of her own thought,

The ideas that never found an utterance.

Laid bare a meaning twisted, deep and strange,

Their links with underlying reality.

Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field

Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths

This world is a vast unbroken totality,

God's summits look back on the mute Abyss.

Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn;

Lives still in one house with the primal beast.

So she beheld the many births of thought,

For the Eternal's powers are like himself,

This too she saw that all in outer mind

Forged in the body's factory by earth-force.

Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,

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The patterns sketched out by an artist God.

Admitted by a silent office gate

Then issued in Time's mart as private make.

A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;

The Power that acts in us is not our force.

Concealed in a supernal secrecy

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

A sample from the laboratory of God

Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;

And takes delivery of the priceless gift

Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;

Although his ego claims the world for its use,

Nature does most in him, God the high rest:

This independent, once a power supreme,

Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature's serf

This is the appearance in our mortal front;

Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,

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In that spiritual vastness can we stand

And mind is only a means and body a tool.

Our spirit's truth lives in the naked self

Out of the mind she rose to escape its law

Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.

And saw creation's life from far above,

To dedicate it to God's timeless calm:

Only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell

Or ripples passing over a lonely pool

Yet the mind's factory had ceased to work,

There came no call from the still fields of life.

Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room

This men call quietude and prize as peace.

Effervescing like a chaos under a lid;

But found no response in the silenced brain:

At every moment might explosion come.

All now was a wide mighty vacancy,

For still was far the repose of the Absolute

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Even now some thoughts could cross her solitude;

Cast up from formlessness to seek a form,

These seemed not born nor made in human Time:

Idea's shapes in complete armour of words

Out of some far expanse they seemed to come

And with easy access reached the inner ear

To the high royal entries of the soul.

Then looking to know whence the intruders came

Pervading and encompassing the world-space

And through it sailing tranquilly a thought.

Ignorant of embargo and blockade,

It came to the silent city of the brain

But met a barring will, a blow of Force

After a long vacant pause another appeared

Mind's unexpected visitors from the Unseen

But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind's coast.

Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary

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In that absolute stillness bare and formidable

That claimed its mystic Nihil's sovereign right

Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin:

A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

The world a pictured symbol drawn on self,

Built up the semblance of a universe

This was self-seeing; in that intolerant hush

There was no sense to frame the figure of things,

Emotion slept deep down in the still heart

All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead,

And joy and grief could never rise again.

But no response came from it and no cry.

Nothing within answered an outside touch,

Yet still her body saw and moved and spoke;

It said whatever needed to be said,

There was no person there behind the act,

All wrought like an unerring apt machine.

And pushed by an old unexhausted force

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All it upheld, in nothing had a share.

An incoherence crossing a firm void

A pure perception was the only power

If that retired, all objects would be extinct,

The house she had built with bricks of thought and sense

This seeing was identical with the seen;

It saw impartially the world go by,

Saw too its abysmal unreality.

But the thought and inner life in forms seemed dead,

A hollow physical shell persisted still.

A cosmic film of scenes and images:

Was a design sketched on a silent mind

By constant beats of visionary sight.

Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space,

That flickered upon dissolution's edge;

Roofed in the mind's illusion of a world.

Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut

Or moving pictures upon Fancy's film:

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The brain's vibrations that appear like thought,

The heart's quiverings felt as joy and grief and love

That body forged from atoms and from gas

Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.

Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace

Yet something was there behind the fading scene;

It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.

And stood aloof from the idea of Time.

All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,

Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.

But sight could not define for it a form;

But hearing listened in vain for a missing sound;

It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice

It met her like an omnipresent point

The single oneness of its multiplied beat

It faced her as some vast Nought's immensity,

An endless Yes to things ever unconceived

An eternal zero or untotalled Aught,

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Yet eternity and infinity seemed but words

To its stupendous lone reality.

All moments flashes from its Timelessness,

That disappear from Mind when That is seen.

A consciousness that saw without a seer,

The Love enamoured of its own delight

Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,

The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.

A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.

And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms

Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

Once sepulchred alive in brain and flesh

She was no more a Person in a world,

What once had been herself had disappeared;

A refugee from the domain of sense,

Delivered from Knowledge and from Ignorance

She shared the Superconscient's high retreat

The first bare solid ground of consciousness;

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There was no temptation of the joy to be.

A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,

She was a point in the unknowable.

Annihilation's vague indefinable step:

And kept her separate from nothingness:

This shadow of herself so close to nought

Return out of the Inconceivable

Even as the Unknowable decreed,

Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape

Even, she might learn what the mystic cipher held,

Could be a blind tenebrous passage screened from sight,

On its secret way to the Ineffable.

Out of the silence and the nullity,

A power of some all-affirming Absolute,

To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,

Or she might wake into God's quietude

And rest appeased in his white eternity.

Or covered in the mystic fathomless blank.

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Or else the Real was the Unknowable.

It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude

END OF CANTO SIX

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