Here are the concluding lines of Book I Canto III of
Savitri, pp. 44-45:
One soul's ambition lifted up the race;
A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.
The universal strengths were linked with his;
Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,
He drew the energies that transmute an age.
Immeasurable by the common look,
He made great dreams a mould for coming things
And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.
His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.
One soul's ambition lifted up the race. In the human
reckoning here are a few examples of the soul of man lifting up with his
ambition the lot of the insufferable human. “When Magellan circumnavigated the
earth, he was hunting for the truth about the globe. When Galileo swept the
heavens with his telescope, he was hunting for a larger vision of the universe.
When Pasteur, in spite of his paralysis, sought for the secret of disease, he
was hunting a remedy for human ills. When
The general tendency of the ethical, even of the idealistic nature
is to shun away from ambition, shun even to the extent of repressing it
completely. The monk and the sannyasi and the evangelist would prefer to live
in monasteries, or in the caves, or away from civilization. “Oh, to be
nothing,” that is the hymn of triumph he would sing; in it he would glorify himself. But such a tendency leads to the weakening of the life-force and
there is emaciation of the creative spirit. The prayer in its intensity of
nothingness gets answered: “to be nothing”, and nothing remains. That is not acceptable to growing life.
But here is a story not of a credulous devotee but of a wise calculating occultist. He was staying in a village, and he had faculty, siddhi, to invoke supernatural powers. He was a good-hearted man, and he wanted to use it only for the benefit of the villagers. Seeing their suffering plight steeped as they were in poverty, he offered his prayers to Goddess Prosperity, knowing that she would bring bright fortune to the simple folk. Her coming to the village, and staying there, would assure it for ever. But this Goddess Prosperity is a swift-footed goddess, and would not remain at one single place permanently. This good-hearted occultist knew all about her fleeting nature, and so worked out a plan. On her arrival at the village he told her: “You please wait here until I come back. I have to go on pilgrimage to holy places of the country and wait here tuntil I return. Your presence is reassuring, and I pray that your gifts flow continuously in this small simple world of small simple creatures. I’m sure every one here will always enjoy your riches.” Taking his leave from her he walked away with a pilgrim staff in his hand—walked away never to return. The helpless Goddess Prosperity, locked as she was, had to stay in the village, the village later they named as “Wait here till I come back”. One man’s great deed brought prosperity to the poor. But did it lift up the race? What does that prosperity mean?
Indeed, this difficult world remains all the while a difficult and helpless world. The global village yet remains oblivious of the universal energies that can transform the mechanistic plight of its hurrying dwellers. If there is the miracle of technology in fostering the idea of a conglomerate yet unified global community, there can be a greater involvement of communities and countries to promote the global culture. A higher and refined mode of collective life can open out for us; it is that which becomes possible only when there is awareness of global responsibilities. But human awareness has to go beyond the mental kind; there has to be also the opening of the vital and the physical, the opening of the soul and the spirit of man to the possibilities of living and breathing prosperity, not as a static power but as an agent of expanding wealth and affluence of the manifesting truth in this creation, truth triumphing ignorance and falsehood and death rooted at the base of life.
Aswapati’s acquiring global powers, universal strengths linked with his, his drawing the energies that transmute an age are in the context of the fundamentals of this world, its foundational realities and the issues associated with it. He drew energies that transmute an age, but these are at best Overmental energies only, and there is no infallibility in their operation, there is no ultimate guarantee of their success; they may not be enduring, as in them there will always be counter-claims. He has to seek and acquire that power by which the objective of a higher life, free of ignorance and death, is achieved. His look has widened, and he has made great dreams a mould for coming things; but the dreams have to become a reality, not just in his case as an individual but on a cosmic scale, for the aspiring collective. His soul’s release from the lower bondage is the starting condition, a necessary condition; but it is not a sufficient condition. A larger and brighter upstream movement must begin. With the soul’s release there is nothing Aswapati wished to gain for himself. He has achieved everything as an individual. The siddhi of the individual is complete in him. But this soul’s release from ignorance remains incomplete. He must live freely and widely in the spirit’s freedom and greatness. It is the spirit that links him with the universe and therefore he cannot remain content without attending to the issue present in it. He must get the secret knowledge working in the cosmic wideness and in it his own spirit must become free of all ties, all bondages of the nature holding back man from wider universal prospects of life in its beauty and truth and delight. The first psycho-spiritual transformation has occurred in him. Next, he has to make the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness. But this too is as yet “only an individual victory. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation.” It is for the fulfilment of the new creation he invokes the divine Shakti to incarnate herself here, that by which all opposition is removed and the prospects for the higher life opened out. That is the work Aswapati came to do.