Passing through the Portals of the Birth that is a Death

In Two Parts: Part A

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo writes:

Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness.

In the cosmic process the Purusha stands aside and allows Prakriti to do all the work of manifestation. In this process one of the first practical and essential things done was to create four qualities or the fourfold soul-forces, the four swabhāvas, as the organisational basis, the Purusha handing over the initiative to Prakriti and himself becoming subject to her operational demands. That was the key step taken the moment things were ready for a certain larger and universal collective life. That was the happy optimism of the Vedic Purusha Sukta in which the Purusha offered himself to be sacrificed. In the language of Savitri:

He has forsaken his omnipotence,

His calm he has foregone and infinity.

He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;

To her he abandons all to make her great.

He hopes in her to find himself anew,

Incarnate, wedding his infinity’s peace

To her creative passion’s ecstasy.

Although possessor of the earth and heavens,

He leaves to her the cosmic management

And watches all, the Witness of her scene…

He leans on her for all he does and is…

In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs…

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,

His acts are her commandment’s registers.

Happy, inert he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance…

In the Bhagavata Purana we have the Bhagavati Shakti of Narayana as one who has established the whole universe, nārāyaņé bhagavatī tad idam viśvam ahitam. She the executive Force accepts the three qualities,—represented by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva,—of the supreme Lord in order to give rise to this material creation. The needed support, ādhāra, for her work, for the work of the Prakriti, is provided by the Purusha; it is the Being or Pure Existence who offers the vast and firm ground to the Chit-Shakti, the Consciousness-Force; it is the indispensable basis for her to do her work, statis becoming the foundation of dynamis. Hers is a long, an arduous and painful task, a task also full of suffering, full of travail. What is a single-aspected oneness in the Transcendental starts becoming dual-multiple in the Overmental and lower creations, Prakriti becoming more and more prominent, more and more active than the Purusha. Therefore her personalities are the ones that stand out more distinctly in the cosmic working.

The four powers of the Chit-Shakti or the Divine Mother described by Sri Aurobindoin The Mother belong to this Overmental creation, with the Purusha aspects present only in the background. These four in us are understanding, life-dynamism, the sense of love and joy and beauty, and skill in work, our capacity to attend to minutiae and essentials, they all attaining perfection by which the will in the physical develops, each of the four characterising a certain trait in us, defining our swabhāva. That is how the soul in us grows. In fact it is the soul, the divine element residing in us, that becomes an alchemic agent to bring about the transformation of the complex of this nature. These are the qualities or energies, guņas, śaktis, by which the individual as well as collective evolution advances.

Here is a paraphrase of the relevant text of The Mother:

·    Transcendental,—the original supreme Shakti, stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal,—the cosmic Mahashakti creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual,—she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between human personality and the divine Nature.

·    The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by the Supreme. Each of the worlds is one play of the Mahashakti. At the summit of this manifestation there are worlds of infinite existence, consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands unveiled eternal Power. Nearer to us are the worlds of the supramental creation in which the Mother is the supramental Mahashakti, a Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its unfailing works and spontaneously perfect in every process. But here are the worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in consciousness from her source, of which the earth is a significant centre and its evolution a crucial process. This too is upheld by the Universal Mother, guided to its secret aim by the Mahashakti.

·    The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation. She stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put in front of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds. These Emanations are the various divine forms and personalities through which men have worshipped her under different names throughout the ages. But also she prepares and shapes through these Powers and their emanations the minds and bodies of her Vibhutis, even as she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for the Vibhutis of the Ishwara, that she may manifest in the physical world and in the disguise of the human consciousness some ray of her power and quality and presence.

·    The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.

·    There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,—most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda. Only when the Four have founded their harmony and freedom of movement can those other rarer Powers manifest in the earth movement and the supramental action become possible.

The powers and personalities of the Divine Mother are for the work of manifestation. The four who stand out prominently are: Maheshwari as the aspect of Wisdom, Mahakali of Strength and Force, Mahalakshmi that of Harmony and Beauty, and Mahasaraswati who is the tireless worker for Perfection and Order. These four powers are the fourfold soul-forces and they operate variously in the cosmic scheme of things. The imperative is the appropriate and congruous working of these four powers in us, in a happy togetherness. Only when they have founded their harmony and freedom can the higher powers of the Mother operate in their dynamism. The aspect of well-organised collective life for the higher creation, preparing for the race of the gnostic beings is greatly dependent upon it.

The equivalence of these four powers described by Sri Aurobindo with the four qualities, swabhāvas, we have in the ancient revelations, such as the Purusha Sukta or the Gita, is unmistakable. The fourfold order, or chaturvarņa as it is called, based on them is a spiritual order working in the occult domain of Nature, Prakriti. If we go by the account of the Purusha Sukta then, it seems, these powers were brought down more or less easily in splendid efficacy of the Sarvahuta Yajna, the Sacrifice of the All; the descent of other powers, indispensable for the supramental manifestation, falls outside its scope. We may somewhat look into this aspect by going through the story recited by the Mother. It is as follows. She is cautious also to say that it should be taken rather as a succinct story:

When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation. So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth. You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself.... As soon as they set to work—they had their own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument… they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake—as I may call it—was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder. The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter —obscure, inconscient, miserable.... The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done. Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin. So, there have been what might be called ‘successive involutions’ in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others... for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds. That is my story.

We may discern the following sequence in this narrative by the Mother: the Supreme’s wish to objectivise himself; emanation of four beings to start the universal development; their separation from the Origin in the joy and freedom they had; the result is the world as presently is; the creative Force, which had emanated these four Beings, is stunned on seeing what had happened; appalled, she turns to the Supreme and prays for the remedy; a command is given to her to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, her Truth into this falsehood, and she does it. That is the great sacrifice she has made, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother, of the creative Force.

Is this Holocaust of the creative Force the same as the Holocaust of the Purusha of the Purusha Sukta in which the Purusha was sacrificed? There are similarities between the two. In the Purusha Sukta the Gods and the Rishis and the Sadhyas invoked the Purusha and offered him in the sacrifice, he becoming the offering; in the other, the creative Force approached the Supreme and at his command precipitated her Consciousness and Love and Truth into the world that had come out of Inconscience and Suffering and Falsehood. This is an involution that has happened only because someone willed it, and also paid a price for it to happen. The Holocaust is a result of that willing. The story of separation of the four beings from their supreme Origin is a former event, describing the involution prior to the holocaustic involution. Such is the story connected with the objectivisation of the Supreme.

In answer to a question on another occasion, the Mother said:

The terrestrial world, the earth came into existence after the descent into the Inconscient, not before. The gradual formation of the different stages of being, from the Supreme to the most material region, is subsequent to the Inconscient… the birth of the Inconscient is prior to the formation of the world, and it was only when the perception came that the whole universe was going to be created uselessly that there was a call and Divine Love plunged into the Inconscient to change it into consciousness… The formation of the earth as we know it, this infinitesimal point in the immense universe, was made precisely in order to concentrate the effort of transformation upon one point… The other worlds have been organised more or less hierarchically, if one may say so, but the earth has a special formation due to the direct intervention, without any intermediary, of the supreme Consciousness in the Inconscient.

Such is the significance of Bhumi of the Purusha Sukta.

There is in Savitri a reference to the Originery involution at a couple of places, the first or the initiating involution concerned with the process of objectivisation, the Sacrifice of the Primal Purusha, of the Impersonal-Personal, the Unmanifest, Avyakta. Thus:

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

When all was plunged in the negating Void,

Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

If Being had not plunged into the dark

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

A contradiction founds the base of life:

The eternal, the divine Reality

Has faced itself with its own contraries;

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

The Purusha of Bliss-and-Knowledge-and-Force is bearing himself the cross of Sorrow-and-Ignorance-and-Helplessness, the triple mystic becoming its opposite, the Cross. He volunteered to enter into the working contradiction, a rewarding contradiction of his own reality. This he has done precisely because it is in that, and in no other way, could God become greater by the fall. 

In a mysterious dispensation’s law

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

And again:

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has entered with his silence into space:

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

He has built a million figures of his power;

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone.

This is the Grand Sacrifice, the Sacrifice by which a creation could be initiated, the utter Originery Sacrifice. Indeed, such is the mechanism by which the non-manifest Supreme could enter into the order of manifestation, a remarkable device by which One could be Many, bahusyām prajāyéyéti, as the Upanishad would say. But in Savitri there is no direct mention of the sacrifice pertaining to the cosmic administration or implementation, such as the creation of the Fourfold Order, the bringing down of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother, the second, the operative involution in the cosmic context.

However, apart from such many portentous involutionary sacrifices there are also, and of necessity, several evolutionary sacrifices of great significance,—and Savitri is rich in them. These pertain to the incarnations and the coming of the Avatars and the Vibhutis. Savitri herself “is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened out, so as to hew the ways of Immortality,” said Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters written in 1936. And about Satyavan? He is the “soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance.” Sri Aurobindo also says that the characters in the story of Savitri are not mere personified qualities, but are “incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.” These living incarnations are of a different kind than those of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother or of the four beings who went far away from the Source, the involutionary emanations.

But what is incarnation, what is Avatarhood? Let us go to the Mother’s answer. She says, Avatar is “the Supreme manifested on earth in a body.” And what is the work the Avatar comes to do? “To go up and down and join the top to the bottom, the whole secret of realisation.” This suggests that the Avatarhood of Satyavan, fallen in the grip of death, belongs to another category. About him the Mother says: “Satyavan—Well, he is the Avatar. He is the incarnation of the Supreme.” His is a kind of supportive incarnation set in the realm of Death. It makes the work of the Consciousness-Force in the Death’s realm possible. To do that, she incarnates personally on earth. That is Savitri’s incarnation.  She awoke when “Man lifted up the burden of his fate.” The Savitri-legend reveals us that. Without Satyavan Savitri exists not; without Savitri Satyavan cannot be rescued. In the process Savitri is the one who goes through “the portals of the birth that is a death.” This also means, the Savitri-incarnation is different from the appearance of the Four Powers of the Consciousness-Force in the cosmic operation. While these Powers are typal, Savitri belongs to the evolutionary, one connected with the universal, the other with the earth.

 RY Deshpande