Passing through the Portals of the Birth that is a Death
In Two Parts: Part B
The phrase “portals of the birth that is a death” is a beautiful description of this sorrowful world, this world of ours, description of our mortal lot, our mortal state, of the conditions in which we make progress through them both together, through birth aided by death. In just a few words, we have here an incomparable picture of this mortal world, mŗtyuloka. Its poetic enchantment is such that the obscurity and the cheerlessness and the falsehood in which we live turn into their happy benign opposites. What we have in this mortal world is the sorry “birth that is a death”. Yet the two together are there to build the House of Life wherein the higher powers of the Spirit could come and dwell. If one knows that, as the Isha Upanishad says, that by which both the Knowledge and the Ignorance are known, then, by the Ignorance one crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys immortality. Truly enough, Life in the present stage of evolution cannot make progress without Death; Death gives the helping hand, is the supporter of growing Life. As a matter of fact, without Death Life would simply get swallowed up by the large hungry mouth of the Inconscience, the Light quenched by the darkness of the Night. A very astounding process this, and we should really wonder at the wisdom that framed it. In Savitri we have the following:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
And, argues Savitri with the stiff incorrigible Death,
…I know beyond all doubt,
The great stars burn with my unceasing fire
And life and death are both its fuel made.
Life only was my blind attempt to love:
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.
The Mother, after reading the line “Life only was my blind attempt to love”, said that it was her experience too, that Life without Death was a blind unfulfilling attempt to love. It would not have won the victory for the Divine, victory over the forces of the dark and terrible uncompromising Inconscience, an antagonist shadow thick as the Void. But after winning the victory, Death would no longer be necessary, and all struggle would vanish. Such is the mystery of Death.
Elsewhere the Mother tells that the four emanations, those first beings of the universe, the four Asuras, cannot be got rid of so easily, by winning just one war. “As long as they are necessary for the universal evolution they will exist. The day they lose their utility, they will be converted or will disappear… There were four of them. The first one has been converted; another is dissolved into its origin. Two are still living and these two are more ferocious than the others. One is known in occultism as the ‘Lord of Falsehood’, the other is the ‘Lord of Death’. And as long as these two beings exist, there will be difficulties.” We have already seen them in the Mother’s story of creation, which is supported by a long-standing occult tradition.
Therefore, personally too the Divine Mother descends to conquer Death, incarnates herself here, in this creation. “In her deep and greater 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 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 creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life.” The Mother’s prayers are in that respect extremely revealing. Here are some of them:
• I have had days when I have lived truly all the horrors of creation (and in the consciousness of their horror), and then that has brought this experience, and... all the horror has disappeared.
• Oh, the horror of falsehood spread everywhere on earth, ruling the world with its law of darkness! I believe that its reign has lasted long enough; this is the master we must now refuse to serve. This is the great, the only remedy.
• MY Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity. But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the call which could arrive to Thee: “Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies appear triumphant; falsehood is the monarch of the world; life without Thee is a death, a perpetual hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out Submission; Faith is spent, Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love. Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies to prevail, falsehood and ugliness and suffering to triumph? Lord, give the command to conquer and victory will be there. I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not yet ready. But I cry to Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save.”Thus, my prayer rushed up towards Thee; and, from the depths of the abyss, I beheld Thee in Thy radiant splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou saidst to me: “Lose not courage, be firm, be confident,—I COME.”
Such intensity of anguish! divine anguish! Such totality of commitment to do the work the Lord had given to her! She is prepared to bear the assaults of the adversary force, the extreme of pain and suffering. Hers is the work connected with the evolutionary soul of the earth into which she has entered and no hardship she discounts in making it progress towards the Divine. It is for that purpose she passes through the groaning portals of the life that is a death. We have the following description in Savitri about the Incarnate’s soul accepting earthly suffering:
A being stood immortal in transience,
Deathless dallying with momentary things,
In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness
Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate
Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:
Observer of the silent steps of the hours,
Eternity upheld the minute’s acts
And the passing scenes of the Everlasting’s play.
In the mystery of its selecting will,
In the Divine Comedy a participant,
The Spirit’s conscious representative,
God’s delegate in our humanity,
Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent’s ray,
She had come into the mortal body’s room
To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.
A joy in the world her master movement here,
The passion of the game lighted her eyes:
A smile on her lips welcomed earth’s bliss and grief,
A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.
All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth
Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,
Crossing the years to immortality;
All she could front with the strong spirit’s peace.
But since she knows the toil of mind and life
As a mother feels and shares her children’s lives,
She puts forth a small portion of herself,
A being no bigger than the thumb of man
Into a hidden region of the heart
To face the pang and to forget the bliss,
To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds
And labour mid the labour of the stars.
Such is the sacrifice, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother as a person, she facing the pang and forgetting the bliss in order to bring to us her glory and her widening powers. Our own birth itself is a startling mystery: “…when a psychic being enters a body, it is as though it fell on its head—it is a little stunned for a time. So during this period it is under the influence of these suggestions without even knowing it. But as soon as it wakes up, it can come out of that; it is not at all necessary to accept them.” This is what the Mother explains. Here the psychic being is entering into the portals of the birth that is accompanied by death.
Why does at all the soul opt to cross through these painful portals? We have an account of it in the Book of Fate where Narad, the heavenly sage, explains the mystery to Savitri’s mother, of the choice made by it to plunge into the evolutionary process. It was “out of curiosity” that it took the plunge, seeing the possibility of another joy in creation.
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night…
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown…
A huge descent began, a giant fall…
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain.
“One does not progress outside terrestrial life. The earthly, material life is essentially the life of progress, it is here that one makes progress,”—says the Mother. And the beauty is, those who want to escape it, even they will be “compelled to progress whether they want it or not. The psychic being itself progresses in them and they are not conscious of it. But they themselves are compelled to progress. That is to say, they follow a curve. They follow an ascent in life. It is the same progress as that of the growing child…” And then: “…even the Divine, when incarnate on earth, is subject to the same law of progress. His instrument of manifestation, the physical being he has assumed, should be in a constant state of progress, and the law of his personal self-expression is in a way linked to the general law of earthly progress. Thus, even the embodied god cannot be perfect on earth until men are ready to understand and accept perfection.” This is great. Significantly, the Mother stresses: “…even the Divine, when incarnate on earth...”
As one particular incarnation,—call her the sweet Mother, call her radiant Savitri, call her a fit intermediary, a beautiful slave of God, the incarnate who came here in the ancient past, the embodied Word, or a living Scripture, a spirit who arrived from the immortal spaces to set her conquering foot on Time, the divine Consciousness-Force, or Mahashakti born on earth,—she, in the arduous field of evolution, has ever been engaged in the work of her Lord. Her yoga-tapasya progresses in the Will of the Lord, her power grows in the Will of the Lord, her action is in the Will of the Lord. A prayer of the Mother speaks of amplitude and majesty, nobility and grace, charm and grandeur, variety and strength, “for it is the will of the Lord to manifest.” For that purpose she is ready to suffer, she is ready to accept cruel “lamentable limitations”, climb up the Calvary of deep-rooted frustration, bear ignominy of human births. This is the personal aspect of the Sacrifice, of the Divine Soul. More specifically, Savitri’s mortal birth was compelled by the world’s desire; she came here answering the earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss. Savitri came here to hew the ways of Immortality. But she has been here all along, all along, and she will continue to be here even as the evolution marches from Ignorance into Knowledge. Apropos of the mode and purpose of incarnation, Sri Aurobindo writes that it is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar.
There are also the great and splendid embodiments of the Divine Mother, her Powers and her dynamic Personalities carrying out the cosmic work. The Four Powers of the Mother are of such a type, already functioning in the vaster scheme of things. Bu they don’t pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, they don’t accept the “lamentable limitations”, they don’t climb up the Calvary of deep-rooted frustration, bear the ignominy of human births. Once the Mother told the Goddess Durga the magic of surrender to the Lord—and then only did Durga see, with utter astonishment, its marvel and its power. Lakshmi, Saraswati, Gauri, Uma, Amba, Bhavani, Parvati, Kali, and in a way even the Madonnas who are present in the cosmic field, are powers and personalities of the Divine Mother, essentially typal in character. There are goddesses and goddesses, devis and matrikas, there are lesser vital embodiments also, embodiments who have drifted far away from her; there are alluring females too, like la belle dame sans merci, and frightful women in a bouge with perilous beauty and charm. But let us take the Mother of Compassion, Karunamayi Mata, we meet in Savitri; she suffers no doubt, but not the way does Savitri, the incarnation that Savitri is. Hers is a picture of Grief Divine:
A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair,
A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.
A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,
Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.
A divine pity on the peaks of the world,
A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,
She looked out far and saw from inner mind
This questionable world of outward things,
Of false appearances and plausible shapes,
This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,
The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars
And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.
Accepting the universe as her body of woe,
The Mother of the seven sorrows bore
The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart:
The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,
Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.
Her heart was riven with the world’s agony
And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,
An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice…
And she herself tells to Savitri:
To share the suffering of the world I came,
I draw my children’s pangs into my breast.
I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;
I am the soul of all who wailing writhe
Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.
I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;
I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows…
The scream of tortured flesh and tortured hearts
Fall’n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven
Has rent with helpless grief and wrath my soul…
Nothing refusing of creation’s load,
I have borne all and know I still must bear…
I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,
Watched Nature’s cruelty to suffering things
While God passed silent by nor turned to help…
I am the hope that looks towards my God,
My God who never came to me till now;
His voice I hear that ever says ‘I come’:
I know that one day he shall come at last.
What are the seven stabs she bore? Here is Stabat Mater with emotions, Our Lady at the Cross and not at the Manger, at Calvary and not at Bethlehem; here is Mary at the Cross and not at the Cradle. Her Seven Sorrows are:
The Prophecy of Simeon
The Flight into Egypt
The Loss of Jesus in the Temple
Mary meets Jesus Carrying the Cross
The Crucifixion
Mary Receives the Dead Body of Her Son
The Burial of Her Son and Closing of the Tomb
Great as the sea was her sorrow. Her prayer is: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. In the Fifth Dolor, the Crucifixion, Mary stood beneath the Cross and watched her Son suffer and die, her heart was united with his. She cried: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. This may be very tender and touching, very poignant, even to a good extent deeply psychic; but the sweet and spiritual which is there in Savitri’s Mother of Compassion, the Grief Divine, duhkhī-kaştī dévī, does not come out with that reassuring definiteness. Perhaps this is because this Mother of Sorrows is typal. She does not pass through the portals of the birth that is a death,—which Savitri does. In that sense this incarnation of the Divine Mother, as Savitri, is just not an embodiment; it is an incarnation. Savitri’s is a sacrifice of a different kind. According to the Law of Sacrifice “a divinising, a saving power descends” to carry the earthly evolution towards greater godhood, even making that godhood’s greater manifestation here more and more possible, more and more ampler. Savitri does it by accepting the earthly conditions in their totality.
The Mother explains the aspect of sacrifice as follows:
The Divine has sacrificed Himself in Matter to awaken consciousness in Matter, which had become inconscient. And it is this sacrifice, this giving of the Divine in Matter, that is to say, His dispersion in Matter, which justifies the sacrifice of Matter to the Divine and makes it obligatory; for it is one and the same reciprocal movement. It is because the Divine has given Himself in Matter and scattered Himself everywhere in Matter to awaken it to the divine consciousness, that Matter is automatically under the obligation to give itself to the Divine. It is a mutual and reciprocal sacrifice. And this is the great secret of the Gita: the affirmation of the divine Presence in the very heart of Matter. And that is why, Matter must sacrifice itself to the Divine, automatically, even unconsciously—whether one wants it or not, this is what happens.
But, actually, it is the Divine Mother as incarnate Savitri who does the Yoga of Surrender to the Supreme and it is she who identifies her will with the Will of the Supreme. Only this incarnation, as Savitri, that can do it and not the other powers and personalities, or embodiments. The surety, the guarantee of the success is also there in this Yoga of Savitri. She alone, and not other powers and personalities, or other embodiments, can attain the needed perfection. Savitri was “sent forth of old beneath the stars” of the dark Night for doing that Yoga.
About the divine will, the divine play, here is the Mother’s Sakyamuni-experience which is very significant:
The days have gone by, stormy and troubled to all appearance but calm and strong in their reality reflecting Thy divine will; they have gone by, deploying, disclosing, developing once more all the unexpected and varied splendour of Thy untiring divine play. And how marvellous it is to watch this when one perceives the infinite criss-crossing of the movements Thy eternal will creates, when one knows that all this is from all eternity and that it is only in our imperfect faculties that it becomes an uninterrupted succession of facts, in which we are gratuitous and ignorant actors. We act with the apparent unconsciousness and blindness of those who do not know, and yet, I do know and, even while being an actor, I am a spectator too. But I am still not pure enough for Thee to unveil before my eyes the totality of the effects and results; it is only partially and imperfectly that I know them before the act and am permitted to act with the knowledge of the ‘why’, with a full illumination as to what Thou expectest from me. When, O Lord, shall I have this purity? But for that too I am no longer impatient and no longer implore. I see how much Thy splendours are obscured and veiled in this miserable and poor instrument; but Thou, Thou knowest why it is thus; and these its shadows and weaknesses Thou dost also use for Thy eternal ends. My soul is in prayer and bows down in love before what it can understand and know of Thee. My soul is in prayer and gives itself unreservedly to Thee in one of those sublime fervours which culminate in identification. My soul is in prayer… and my body too; and my thought is silent in a mute ecstasy.
And then she receives the communication:
As thou art contemplating me, I shall speak to thee this evening. I see in thy heart a diamond surrounded by a golden light. It is at once pure and warm, something which may manifest impersonal love; but why dost thou keep this treasure enclosed in that dark casket lined with deep purple? The outermost covering is of a deep lustreless blue, a real mantle of darkness. It would seem that thou art afraid of showing thy splendour. Learn to radiate and do not fear the storm: the wind carries us far from the shore but shows us over the world. Wouldst thou be thrifty of thy tenderness? But the source of love is infinite. Dost thou fear to be misunderstood? But where hast thou seen man capable of understanding the Divine? And if the eternal truth finds in thee a means of manifesting itself, what dost thou care for all the rest? Thou art like a pilgrim coming out of the sanctuary; standing on the threshold in front of the crowd, he hesitates before revealing his precious secret, that of his supreme discovery. Listen, I too hesitated for days, for I could foresee both my preaching and its results: the imperfection of expression and the still greater imperfection of understanding. And yet I turned to the earth and men and brought them my message. Turn to the earth and men—isn’t this the command thou always hearest in thy heart?—in thy heart, for it is that which carries a blessed message for those who are athirst for compassion. Henceforth nothing can attack the diamond. It is unassailable in its perfect constitution and the soft radiance that flashes from it can change many things in the hearts of men. Thou doubtest thy power and fearest thy ignorance? It is precisely this that wraps up thy strength in that dark mantle of starless night. Thou hesitatest and tremblest as on the threshold of a mystery, for now the mystery of the manifestation seems to thee more terrible and unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause. But thou must take courage again and obey the injunction from the depths. It is I who am telling thee this, for I know thee and love thee as thou didst know and love me once. I have appeared clearly before thy sight so that thou mayst in no way doubt my word. And also to thy eyes I have shown thy heart so that thou canst thus see what the supreme Truth has willed for it, so that thou mayst discover in it the law of thy being. The thing still seems to thee quite difficult: a day will come when thou wilt wonder how for so long it could have been otherwise.
The mystery of manifestation is “[more] terrible and unfathomable than the Eternal Cause”; it indeed looks strange, the problem of death and ignorance arising out of the immortal spirit full of knowledge and wisdom, prajnānam brahma giving rise to its weird extreme opposites. However, it is precisely to remove that mystery, to bestow reality’s sense and purpose, to discover the law that governs it that the divine Soul takes birth here. What is true of the Chit-Shakti’s incarnations passing through the portals of the life that is a death, is also true for the supreme Purusha’s incarnations, the Avatars and also the great Vibhutis. But why does this transcendental Divine come at all as incarnations, and do they really undergo the thousand sufferings our flesh is prone to? When the Divine comes, asserts Sri Aurobindo in a letter to Dilip Roy, he suffers or struggles not for himself, “but in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real… the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them.” And then: “The manifestation of the Divine in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity and find the way to realise it… The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way—men need not be extraordinary beings to follow it. That is the mistake you are making—to harp on greatness as if only the great can be spiritual.” This was in the mid-1930s. But even during the earlier period Sri Aurobindo, speaking about himself, said in letter written in 1911: “I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful.” A work severe and painful—and it stands to perfect reason that anyone wishing to change the earth-nature must work hard against all odds, against every kind of antagonism, first bear its law, the law of anguish and suffering, must come in contact with the harsh physical reality of this life, this existence on earth. In a letter, again written to Dilip Roy, Sri Aurobindo quotes a stanza from his own poem A God’s Labour, unpublished at that time, in 1935:
He who would bring the heavens here,
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
The heavy yoke of Death and Ignorance he must bear to do God’s work, do it precisely in those conditions. But in the next stanza the description proceeds to make a revealing statement; it is about the deep and occult process by which the Divine Soul carries out his work:
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
Here is the Sacrifice of the supreme Purusha; here is his coming down personally too, and here is his passing through the portals of the life that is a death. The incarnation must “reach the grim foundation stone, knock at the keyless gates”, pass through “the gates of death and birth”, accept the life that is a death. In Savitri we have a much direr description of the pain suffered by the Avatar. Aswapati, in order to discover the cause of this world’s failure, has entered into the depths of the primordial Night. There,
All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;
His spirit became an empty listening gulf
Void of the dead illusion of a world:
Nothing was left, not even an evil face.
He was alone with the grey python Night.
A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,
Which seemed alive but without body or mind,
Lusted all beings to annihilate
That it might be for ever nude and sole.
As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,
Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,
His being from its own vision disappeared
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.
Existence smothered travailed to survive;
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in its course.
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction’s peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.
We have absolutely no conception, no understanding, no idea of the pain bourn by the Avatar, the Divine Pain, bourn for the sake of this mortal creature. The Mother says:
People do not know what a tremendous sacrifice Sri Aurobindo has made for the world. About a year ago, while I was discussing things, I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke out in a very firm tone, ‘No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation, I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation.’ We stand in the Presence of Him who has sacrificed his physical life in order to help more fully his work of transformation. He is always with us, aware of what we are doing, of all our thoughts, of all our feelings and all our actions.
She told this to one of her attendants on 18 January 1951. And then, we have her prayer dated 9 December 1950, later inscribed on the Samadhi:
To Thee who hast been the material envelope of our Master, to Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee.
He “who worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so much, willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all,”—about him we comprehend nothing. What can we know about the Avatar’s passing through the portals of the life that is a death? nothing, not a bit.
RY Deshpande