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The Finding of the Soul

Book 7, Canto 5. The arrival. What The Parable of the Search for the Soul commanded, The Entry into the Inner Countries began, and The Triple Soul-Forces approached without entering, this canto completes. Savitri passes first through a "night of God" — an emptiness deeper than the mental emptiness of Canto 3 — then into a temple-chamber of the gods that turns out to be a chamber of her own cosmic identities, and finally through "a wall of doorless living fire" into the small bright room where her secret soul lives. The meeting is brief. They rushed into each other and grew one. What follows is the descent of The Divine Mother into her opened heart, the rising of the kundalini Serpent from base to crown, and the transformation of each centre of the body — the first perfection that Aswapati also reached in Book 2 but which is here given as the gift of the soul itself.

This is the structural turn of the whole Book of Yoga. Cantos 1–4 were searching; this canto finds. Cantos 6–7 will push past even this finding into wider liberations — Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness — but the soul-discovery here is the foundation everything later rests on.

What the canto is doing

It is showing the meeting with the psychic being — Sri Aurobindo's technical term, in his prose, for the soul as it has evolved through incarnations: a portion of the Divine no bigger than a thumb (the angushtha-matra purusha of the Katha Upanishad) seated in the heart, "deathless dallying with momentary things." The canto's central scene is the encounter between Savitri's surface self and this psychic being. They recognise one another and merge.

The canto is also doing two things that the prose tradition tends to separate. First, the soul-finding is given as a journey through a temple of all the soul's cosmic forms — Savitri is shown that she is the Beloved of the Supreme, that the Mother in her many faces is herself, that the divine couples (Brahma–Saraswati, Shiva–Shakti, Krishna–Radha) are she in different modes. Then, having located herself at this height, she returns to find the smaller psychic being in the heart-chamber — and the small and the cosmic turn out to be the same. The yoga that integrates the two is the yoga the canto records.

Second, having shown the soul, the canto immediately shows what the descent of the Mother through the awakened soul does to the body. The second half of the canto is one of the most direct accounts in Savitri of the opening of the chakras. The transformation is not a private spiritual achievement; it is a re-government of every level of the human being.

The night of God

The canto opens with the deepest of the inward darknesses Savitri has yet entered:

ONWARD she passed seeking the soul's mystic cave. At first she stepped into a night of God. The light was quenched that helps the labouring world, The power that struggles and stumbles in our life; This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts, The striving heart its unavailing hopes. All knowledge failed and the Idea's forms…

This is not the emptiness of trance from Canto 3. It is surrender in the strict mystical sense — every faculty laid down. Sri Aurobindo describes it as a holy ignorance:

An innocent and holy Ignorance Adored like one who worships formless God The unseen Light she could not claim nor own. In a simple purity of emptiness Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.

The line humility seemed now too proud a state names the depth precisely. Humility is still a stance taken by a self toward God. Here even that has gone. Her self was nothing, God alone was all, / Yet God she knew not but only knew he was. The yoga has entered the via negativa — knowing only by unknowing.

The image of her walking through this is one of the canto's strangest:

As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene, A small nought passing through a mightier Nought, A night of person in a bare outline Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night, Silent she moved, empty and absolute.

A small nought passing through a mightier Nought. The two voids — the void of the surrendered self and the void of the formless Divine — touch. Sri Aurobindo is preparing the reader for Canto 6, where the mightier Nought will be entered as a metaphysical position. Here it is only crossed.

The dawn and the recognition

The change comes as a dawn:

At last a change approached, the emptiness broke; A wave rippled within, the world had stirred; Once more her inner self became her space. There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal; Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill, The air trembled with passion and delight. A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams, The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.

And then — the recognition that this place she has come to is not new:

As if an old remembered dream come true, She recognised in her prophetic mind The imperishable lustre of that sky, The tremulous sweetness of that happy air And, covered from mind's view and life's approach, The mystic cavern in the sacred hill And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.

The line as if an old remembered dream come true is doing important work. The soul-finding is not the acquisition of something new; it is the re-finding of what was always there. The canto's emotional register is recovery, not conquest.

The rock-temple of the gods

The cavern is described as a temple cut into a sacred hill. Sri Aurobindo gives it a long ceremonial entrance:

An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors Carved in the massive stone of Matter's trance. Two golden serpents round the lintel curled, Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength, Looked out with wisdom's deep and luminous eyes. An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings: Flames of self-lost immobile reverie, Doves crowded the grey musing cornices…

The iconography is universal-mystical rather than specifically Hindu — serpents, eagle, doves — figures that recur in temples across cultures because they encode the same psychological events. Inside:

Across the threshold's sleep she entered in And found herself amid great figures of gods Conscious in stone and living without breath, Watching with fixed regard the soul of man, Executive figures of the cosmic self, World-symbols of immutable potency.

The carvings on the walls show the climbing planes — every order of being, from beast to god — in their cosmic relationships:

They were the extension of the self of God And housed, impassively receiving all, His figures and his small and mighty acts And his passion and his birth and life and death And his return to immortality.

This is a curious moment of poetic theology. Sri Aurobindo is showing that what the great temples of the world have been trying to depict in stone is the inner reality Savitri is walking through. The temple is the cosmos as the soul knows it.

The sealed identity

What happens next is the canto's first revelation:

As thus she passed in that mysterious place Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door, She felt herself made one with all she saw. A sealed identity within her woke; She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme: These Gods and Goddesses were he and she: The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight, The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp, The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap, — The Master and the Mother of all lives Watching the worlds their twin regard had made, And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss, The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.

This is the cosmic identification. The gods and goddesses are not other; they are her own forms. The famous divine couples — Brahma–Sarasvati (the Word), Shiva–Shakti (the Power on his lap), Krishna–Radha (the Adorer and Adored) — are her own being seen as the eternal duality of consciousness and force. This is what the The Triple Soul-Forces canto was preparing: the three Madonnas were portions of her; here she sees that she is the Mother as such, in every divine couple.

The chamber ends at a figure she cannot see:

In the last chamber on a golden seat One sat whose shape no vision could define; Only one felt the world's unattainable fount, A Power of which she was a straying Force, An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire…

The Supreme who cannot be imaged sits at the temple's end. Of this Supreme Savitri is named a straying Force — a portion of the original Power that has wandered into the manifest world. The cosmic identification is at its highest pitch here. What follows turns it back toward the human.

The chamber of fire and the meeting

The transition is one of the canto's quietest sentences:

Thence all departed into silent self, And all became formless and pure and bare. Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock She came out where there shone a deathless sun. A house was there all made of flame and light And crossing a wall of doorless living fire There suddenly she met her secret soul.

The cosmic temple gives way to a small room of fire. The Supreme on the golden seat gives way to a single being. Sri Aurobindo's portrait of the psychic being is one of the most important descriptive passages in the epic:

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.

The line deathless dallying with momentary things defines the psychic being: the deathless that has consented to play with what dies. The pity-and-sorrow phrase is doing precise work — the psychic being feels what it sees, but the feeling does not abrogate its tranquil happiness. It is both compassionate and unshaken.

The soul's reason for incarnation is then given:

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.

The reason is play — the lila of Indian tradition, given here in a strikingly homely image: to play at ball with Time and Circumstance. The high theological doctrine and the children's-game image are placed side by side because they are the same fact.

The thumb-sized being

Sri Aurobindo then gives one of the canto's most important doctrinal statements — the relation between the deep soul and the small portion of it that acts in us:

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. This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke, Exults in victory, struggles for the crown; Identified with the mind and body and life, It takes on itself their anguish and defeat, Bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross, Yet is the unwounded and immortal self Supporting the actor in the human scene.

The image — a being no bigger than the thumb of man — is the angushtha-matra purusha of the Katha Upanishad: the Person of the size of a thumb who dwells in the heart. Sri Aurobindo's claim is that this small figure is a portion put forth of the larger psychic being so that the cosmic soul can know what it is like to suffer. To face the pang and to forget the bliss. The forgetting is part of the gift — without it the suffering would not be real. The unwounded soul deliberately becomes wound-able by sending out the small portion.

The line bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross is unmistakably the figure of Christ in the wider symbolism of the canto. Sri Aurobindo treats the Christ-figure as the universal pattern of the small soul that takes incarnation knowing it must suffer. The whole metaphysics of incarnation in Savitri is in these lines.

The meeting and the merger

The encounter:

Here in this chamber of flame and light they met; They looked upon each other, knew themselves, The secret deity and its human part, The calm immortal and the struggling soul. Then with a magic transformation's speed They rushed into each other and grew one.

They rushed into each other and grew one. The single sentence is the canto's structural pivot. The human Savitri and the divine Savitri — separated since Canto 1 of this book and since The Joy of Union and the Ordeal of Foreknowledge's "Still veiled from her was the silent Being within" — are now one being.

She returns to the body's place:

Once more she was human upon earthly soil In the muttering night amid the rain-swept woods And the rude cottage where she sat in trance: That subtle world withdrew deeply within Behind the sun-veil of the inner sight.

But she is changed. The half-opened lotus bud of her heart / Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray.

The descent of the Mother

What follows is the second great event of the canto — the descent. The opened soul calls down its source:

In its deep lotus home her being sat As if on concentration's marble seat, Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds To make this earthly tenement her house. As in a flash from a supernal light, A living image of the original Power, A face, a form came down into her heart And made of it its temple and pure abode.

The Mother whom Savitri saw in cosmic form in the temple now enters her body's heart-room directly. She is not summoned as a separate being; she comes because the channel through which she has always been working has now been opened.

The Serpent rises

The next movement is the kundalini awakening. Sri Aurobindo gives it without occult ornament — the language is plain:

But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom, A mighty movement rocked the inner space As if a world were shaken and found its soul: Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless night A flaming Serpent rose released from sleep. It rose billowing its coils and stood erect And climbing mightily, stormily on its way It touched her centres with its flaming mouth; As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep, They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss. Then at the crown it joined the Eternal's space.

The kundalini's path — from the Inconscient's soulless mindless night at the base to the crown where it joins the Eternal's space — is the standard tantric account, given by Sri Aurobindo as the natural consequence of the descent of the Mother into a body whose soul has been found. The Serpent rises because the Mother has come down; the two movements are one event seen from two ends.

The Mother enthroned

What is now present in her is the Mother in image-form:

An image sat of the original Power Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face. Armed, bearer of the weapon and the sign Whose occult might no magic can imitate, Manifold yet one she sat, a guardian force… A sacred beast lay prone below her feet, A silent flame-eyed mass of living force.

The vehicle-beast at her feet is the lion or tiger of Durga — though Sri Aurobindo leaves the specific identity open. She is manifold yet one — all the Madonnas of the previous canto are present in her as aspects.

The transformation of the centres

The longest of the canto's late passages catalogues the use the Mother now makes of the body. Each of the chakras — head, brow, throat, heart, navel, lower, base — is renamed and renewed:

In the country of the lotus of the head Which thinking mind has made its busy space, In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will, In the passage of the lotus of the throat Where speech must rise… A glad uplift and a new working came. The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded view…

The head, brow, and throat — the three centres of mind, will, and speech — are taken over. Each shape showed its occult design, unveiled / God's meaning in it for which it was made. The faculty of perception itself is being changed.

The heart:

In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart Love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn Made life and body mirrors of sacred joy And all the emotions gave themselves to God.

The line love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn — hymeneal of marriage — links this transformation back to the marriage that began Book 7. Savitri's love for Satyavan is not displaced; it is taken up into the divine register, becoming the local form of love-as-cosmic-principle.

The navel and the lower centres — the seats of ambition and desire — are not suppressed but transformed:

In the navel lotus' broad imperial range Its proud ambitions and its master lusts Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway To do a work of God on earthly soil. In the narrow nether centre's petty parts Its childish game of daily dwarf desires Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play, A romp of little gods with life in Time.

The phrase a romp of little gods with life in Time is Sri Aurobindo's quiet refutation of asceticism. The vital nature is not destroyed; its small desires become a divine play.

The base:

In the deep place where once the Serpent slept, There came a grip on Matter's giant powers For large utilities in life's little space; A firm ground was made for Heaven's descending might.

The base is now a firm ground for Heaven's descending might. This is one of the canto's most important sentences for understanding what the rest of the epic is going to claim. Savitri's body has become the place where heaven can land.

The new government

The whole settlement is summarised:

A secret soul behind supporting all Is master and witness of our ignorant life, Admits the Person's look and Nature's role. But once the hidden doors are flung apart Then the veiled king steps out in Nature's front; A Light comes down into the Ignorance, Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp: The mind becomes a mastered instrument And life a hue and figure of the soul.

The image — the veiled king steps out in Nature's front — is the inverse of The Joy of Union and the Ordeal of Foreknowledge, where the silent Being within was veiled. The veil is now removed. Sri Aurobindo names what follows in the moral register:

Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists; They struggle no more in our delivered hearts: Our acts chime with God's simple natural good Or serve the rule of a supernal Right. All moods unlovely, evil and untrue Forsake their stations in fierce disarray And hide their shame in the subconscient's dusk.

Once the soul is in charge, the distinction between sin and virtue as struggle is over. Acts simply chime with the good because the source is now divine. Evil moods do not disappear from the cosmos — they retreat to "the subconscient's dusk." The cosmos still has its dark forces; what has changed is who governs the body.

The mind's cry and the caveat

The canto then gives the cry of the awakened mind — premature but honest:

Then lifts the mind a cry of victory: "O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven, Within we have found the kingdom here of God, His fortress built in a loud ignorant world. Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light, We have turned space into a gulf of peace And made the body a Capitol of bliss. What more, what more, if more must still be done?"

This is the climber's question at the first summit: what more? Sri Aurobindo's answer is given in the canto's closing lines, and it is the structural setup for the rest of Book 7:

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. Even if the struggling world is left outside One man's perfection still can save the world. There is won a new proximity to the skies, A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven, A deep concordat between Truth and Life: A camp of God is pitched in human time.

A first perfection. The word first is doing the structural work. The canto is naming this stage as enough for an individual life — one man's perfection still can save the world — but not as the consummation. The line a camp of God is pitched in human time is exact: a camp, not yet a city. The next two cantos — Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute and The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness — will push past this first perfection into the via negativa and the cosmic identity that even this soul-finding has not yet reached.

Connections

This canto completes what The Parable of the Search for the Soul commanded and The Entry into the Inner Countries began. The cosmic identifications it gives — the Mother of Beauty and Delight, the Word in Brahma's clasp, the World-Puissance on Shiva's lap — extend, from inside Savitri's being, the The Divine Mother whom Aswapati met from outside in The Adoration of the Divine Mother. The descent of the Mother into her opened heart is the inner equivalent of the boon Aswapati received in The Vision and the Boon; the same descending power now enters Savitri herself. The Serpent rising out of the Inconscient recapitulates the whole evolutionary story of The Inconscient in a single body. The thumb-sized portion put forth into the heart-chamber to share suffering is the psychic being — the purusha that has, since the Upanishads, been said to live in the lotus of the heart, and that Sri Aurobindo identifies as the centre of his own yoga. The chakra-transformation passage parallels The World-Soul and The Greater Knowledge in Book 2 — Aswapati's analogous discoveries — but the bodily settlement here is more concrete than Aswapati's, because Savitri's yoga is being done with a body that must remain in the world. The cry what more? is answered by Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute.

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