Bearing on the theme developed by David Johnston in several instalments under the title Jung’s Psychology of the Living God and Transformation of Individual and Community, I am posting here a chapter which appears in my book Narad’s Arrival at Madra. The book essentially deals with the opening passage of 83 lines of the Book of Fate of Savitri. The background briefly stated is as follows. Savitri the radiant daughter of Aswapati, the king of Madra land, has grown into full maidenhood and is advised to find for herself her life’s partner. In a distant forest she meets Satyavan, the son of exiled king Dyumatsena, and they decide to be together. Even as she returns to the palace, Savitri sees her parents in the company of the heavenly sage Narad who had hastened to be there in time just before her arrival. The intention behind his visit was to deliver the Word of Fate, that exactly one year after the marriage of Savitri with Satyavan he will die. Narad foresees this supernaturally charged possibility in the greater design and leaves his home in Paradise to be at Madra. While he is on his way to the place, he sings the Song of Creation, and the Name of Vishnu, and the Glory and Marvel still to be born. He sings of the delight when every barrier falls, and the transfiguration and the ecstasy. In its spell the demons, foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task, weep with joy that soon they shall be released from their self-chosen doom. The evolution marches on. Out of the Inconscience and the obscurity of matter came first life and then mind; what is now expected is the glory and marvel of the divine birth, the establishment of the name of Vishnu here. This song has the entirety of sweetness to bring joy to the hostiles who have stood too long in the way of this growth of consciousness. They are happy that they will soon be vanquished in the greatness of the Spirit and that in its victory their horrendous task will get terminated; the product of the dark Inconscience shall be dissolved for good. In response to every descent that had occurred until now, it always threw answer antagonistically to distort it, if not to destroy it. Therefore triumphing over it means establishing a greater delight in mode of the very existence-consciousness itself. The demons now return into the supreme Origin from which they had come, the bright Womb of the Creation. The relationship of the primordial Creative Shadow and the weeping of the Demons to return to their Origin has deeper occult connotations which no other shadow can throw light on. Thus Evil Persona turns out to be simply an operative mechanism in the greater scheme of things and its unexaggerated importance just lies in it. The present article discusses some of these details in the limit of a chapter of a book.

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The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."

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