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The Parable of the Search for the Soul

Book 7, Canto 2. The inward turn that the previous canto set up. During the storm-vigil that ended The Joy of Union and the Ordeal of Foreknowledge, a Voice descends into Savitri from her own highest summit. It asks why she came if only to grieve. She first answers with the temptation she has so far resisted — to die with Satyavan and forget eternity's call. The Voice refuses the answer. A Power within her — distinct from her grieving heart — replies in her stead: I am thy portion here charged with thy work… command, for I am here to do thy will. The Voice then gives her the command that frames the rest of Book 7: Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self. What follows — and what gives the canto its name as a Parable — is the vision that opens for her once she sits down to obey: the whole cosmic situation of the human creature, the layered self, the dark inhabitants of its lower rooms, the unborn gods waiting in its depths, and the secret task for which a portion of The Divine Mother descended into her.

The canto is the doctrinal and structural backbone of Book 7. Everything from here to Canto 7 is the working-out of the command given here.

What the canto is doing

It is doing two things at once. First, it is recording the moment of call — the moment at which Savitri stops being a sorrowing wife and accepts the office she came down to fulfil. Second, it is opening, in vision, the cosmological map of what that office requires. The map is delivered not as abstract teaching but as something she sees once her body becomes a "stark / And rigid golden statue of motionless trance." The Parable, in other words, is not a story she is told. It is the whole of reality as it shows itself to a consciousness that has just turned inward.

The canto is also re-stating, at a much higher pressure, material the poem has already laid out. Aswapati saw the planes; Narad named the cause of pain; the Letters defined the Inconscient. Here the same metaphysics is delivered as imperative — what Savitri must do because of what the cosmos is.

The Voice from the summit

The canto opens with Savitri sleepless beside Satyavan in the storm. The first event is not a thought but an arrival:

A summons from her being's summit came, A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night. Above her brows where will and knowledge meet A mighty Voice invaded mortal space. It seemed to come from inaccessible heights And yet was intimate with all the world…

Sri Aurobindo is careful with the location. The Voice is from her summit — her own highest part — and yet it speaks as something other than her present self. The effect on the body is immediate:

As the Voice touched, her body became a stark And rigid golden statue of motionless trance, A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul.

This image returns at the canto's centre and at its close. The trance-state in which the Parable is received is Savitri's body itself held as a statue while the inner work proceeds. The yoga that begins here is not a leaving of the body. It is the body being made the still vessel of an enormous inner event.

The Voice's first question is uncompromising:

"Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth, This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time, O spirit, O immortal energy, If 'twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom? Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death."

The Voice is not consoling. It is naming the smallness of the response so far. Was the descent into a body for this?

Savitri's first answer — the great refusal

What follows is one of the canto's most important passages, and one easy to misread. Savitri's heart — not her summit, not her soul, the heart that has been counting Narad's days through Canto 1 — answers the Voice with a long speech that articulates the temptation she has so far only felt:

"My strength is taken from me and given to Death. Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light… Is there a God whom any cry can move? He sits in peace and leaves the mortal's strength Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death."

The speech is significant because Sri Aurobindo gives the heart's despair its full hearing. It is not dismissed. The case is made: the ignorant race resists its saviours; God seems to sit unmoved; Law and Inconscience and Death have the only working power. The conclusion the heart draws from this case is the conclusion of every wisdom-tradition that responds to suffering by ceasing to engage with the world:

This surely is best to pactise with my fate And follow close behind my lover's steps And pass through night from twilight to the sun Across the tenebrous river that divides The adjoining parishes of earth and heaven. Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast, Untroubled by thought, untroubled by our hearts, Forgetting man and life and time and its hours, Forgetting eternity's call, forgetting God."

Three "forgettings" close the speech. Forgetting man and life… forgetting eternity's call… forgetting God. The argument is the standard mystical case for liberation-as-withdrawal — even the call of eternity is to be forgotten in shared dissolution. Sri Aurobindo is placing this here deliberately because it is the most attractive form of the refusal. It is not selfishness; it is the renunciate's logic applied to love. The Voice must refuse it not as wrong but as insufficient.

The Voice's refusal

The Voice's reply names the office Savitri has consented to:

"Is this enough, O spirit? And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows The work was left undone for which it came?… Cam'st thou not down to open the doors of Fate, The iron doors that seemed for ever closed, And lead man to Truth's wide and golden road That runs through finite things to eternity? Is this then the report that I must make, My head bowed with shame before the Eternal's seat, — His power he kindled in thy body has failed, His labourer returns, her task undone?"

The argument is one of vocation, not duty. The Voice does not say "you have an obligation." It says: what will your own soul say when it wakes? The Voice is appealing to the deeper Savitri to recognise the speech of the lesser one and to come forward.

The Power within — the shift

The shift is the canto's first decisive event:

Then Savitri's heart fell mute, it spoke no word. But holding back her troubled rebel heart, Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill, Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance, Its peak immutable above mind's air, A Power within her answered the still Voice: "I am thy portion here charged with thy work, As thou myself seated for ever above, Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice, Command, for I am here to do thy will."

This is the moment at which the higher Savitri claims itself. Note the structure of her words: I am thy portion here charged with thy work, / As thou myself seated for ever above. The Voice and this Power are the same being, one above and one below — thou is myself. The split between the human Savitri and the divine Savitri begins here to close. The yoga of Book 7 is the closing of that split.

The command

What the Voice now gives is the program of the rest of Book 7:

"Remember why thou cam'st: Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self, In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths, Then mortal nature change to the divine. Open God's door, enter into his trance. Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light: In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain His vast Truth wake within and know and see. Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit's sight… Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God: Thy nature shall be the engine of his works, Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word: Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death."

Each line is the title of a stage. Find out thy soul — Cantos 3–5 will be the search. Cast Thought — that is Canto 6, Nirvana. Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God — Canto 7, the cosmic consciousness. Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death — the whole of Books 9–11. The Voice has just sketched the architecture of the rest of the poem in twenty lines.

The trance and the vision begin

Savitri sits down beside Satyavan, still in the golden trance, and turns her gaze inward:

Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat, Still rigid in her golden motionless pose, A statue of the fire of the inner sun. In the black night the wrath of storm swept by, The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed… Impassive mid the movement and the cry, Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life, She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

What opens is "a dream" — a vision in the technical sense — that "disclosed to her the cosmic past, / The crypt-seed and the mystic origins, / The shadowy beginnings of world-fate." The Parable is what she sees. Sri Aurobindo's choice of parable in the canto's title is exact: she is being shown the whole human situation as a single story in which everything has its place, so that she can see what her own work has to do.

The evolution of consciousness

The vision starts at the bottom — at the Inconscient — and traces consciousness emerging:

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self Creation took its first mysterious steps, It made the body's shape a house of soul And Matter learned to think and person grew… All was the deed of a blind World-Energy: Unconscious of her own exploits she worked, Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

She sees Mind built up by accretion — "a foam of memories hardened" into "a bright crust of habitual sense and thought," "a seat of living personality." The human emerges as "a floating isle upon a bottomless sea":

A conscious being was by this labour made; It looked around it on its difficult field In the green wonderful and perilous earth; It hoped in a brief body to survive, Relying on Matter's false eternity. It felt a godhead in its fragile house; It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

The line It felt a godhead in its fragile house is the seed of the Parable. The whole vision is an unfolding of what that godhead is, where it lives, and what threatens it.

The mind that cannot stop

A long passage gives the portrait of ordinary mental life that Aswapati's yoga also had to traverse, but here it is given as Savitri's diagnostic of the situation she has to transform:

This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep, In the incessant circling of its steps Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain; It toils like a machine and cannot stop. Into the body's many-storeyed rooms Endless crowd down the dream-god's messages. All is a hundred-toned murmur and babble and stir, There is a tireless running to and fro, A haste of movement and a ceaseless cry.

This is what the Voice's Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light will require her to silence. The line It toils like a machine and cannot stop is doing exact work: ordinary mind is not chosen; it runs. The yoga has to interrupt it.

The hidden king

Against this surface, the great claim:

This is the little surface of man's life. He is this and he is all the universe; He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss; A whole mysterious world is locked within. Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms… The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful Casts into the argent purity of his soul His splendour and his greatness and the light Of self-creation in Time's infinity As into a sublimely mirroring glass. Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.

Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God. The single line summarises the whole metaphysical case the Letters on Savitri make against world-renunciation. The world is not a mistake to be left. It is the field on which God's dreams are being worked out. The work, however, can only be done by a man who knows he is the hidden king. That knowledge is what Savitri is sitting down to recover.

The dark inhabitants

The Parable now turns to its hardest passage — the cosmology of the lower forces that share the human house. The transition is one line:

But all is there, even God's opposites…

What follows is among the poem's most direct accounts of the dark side of the layered self. The "Titan and the Fury and the Djinn / Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit / And the Beast grovels in his antre den." When they wake, they become "his masters or his ministers." The vivid passage:

Inferno surges into the human air And touches all with a perverting breath. Grey forces like a thin miasma creep, Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion's doors, Discolouring the walls of upper mind In which he lives his fair and specious life, And leave behind a stench of sin and death…

Sri Aurobindo names what happens collectively when these forces rise across the world:

An awful insurgence overpowers man's soul. In house and house the huge uprising grows: Hell's companies are loosed to do their work, Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors, Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay And fill with horror and carnage God's fair world. Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth…

This is the Parable explaining why the saviour is required and what the saviour is up against. The Adversary Narad named in the previous book is here described not as a single being but as a condition — the soul that harbours evil "it can dislodge, / Expel the householder, possess the house." Evil is "An opposite potency contradicting God, / A momentary Evil's almightiness" that imitates the Godhead it denies. The horizon of horror is real and not denied.

The guardian power

The passage immediately swings to the counter-truth. The dark forces are there; so is the protection:

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save, Calm eyes divine regard the human scene. All the world's possibilities in man Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed: His past lives in him; it drives his future's pace; His present's acts fashion his coming fate. The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life. This is the converse of the dark inhabitants. The same depths that house the Titan and the Beast also house the gods who have not yet stepped forward. The Parable is balancing its accounts: the human composite contains both the worst and the best of what has ever been, and what comes forward depends on what is called.

The layered self

The Parable then states the cosmology of the human person as four storeys:

A portion of us lives in present Time, A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes; Out of the inconscient and subliminal Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light And strive to know and master a dubious world… Above us dwells a superconscient God Hidden in the mystery of his own light: Around us is a vast of ignorance Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind, Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

This is the same architecture Aswapati climbed in Book 2 — Inconscient below, Ignorance around, superconscient God above — but here it is being given to Savitri as the topography of her own being. She is not going to travel through these worlds the way her father did. She is going to find each of them inside herself.

The Parable corrects an obvious reading. This four-storey picture is not the whole truth:

But this is only Matter's first self-view, A scale and series in the Ignorance. This is not all we are or all our world. Our greater self of knowledge waits for us, A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast… It shall descend and make earth's life divine. Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force. The line is being placed here because everything before it could be read as fatalism. Evolution has built up a flawed creature in a dangerous house. And yet — the Truth that made the world has not abdicated. The greater self exists, and it is descending. Savitri's work is to be the place where it descends.

The aspect of eternity in us

A passage of unusual tenderness follows — the description of the part of us that is already what we are becoming:

Our summits in the superconscient's blaze Are glorious with the very face of God: There is our aspect of eternity, There is the figure of the god we are, His young unaging look on deathless things, His joy in our escape from death and Time, His immortality and light and bliss.

The phrase the figure of the god we are is doing important work. Sri Aurobindo is not saying we shall become gods. He is saying that our god-form already exists at our summit and is the truth of what we are; the descent and the yoga are how it makes its way through to the body. This is, again, why Savitri's labour is in a body — the god-form must become visible here.

Evolution recapitulated

The Parable then recapitulates the evolutionary story upward — the ape becoming the thinker, the thinker becoming the occult seeker, the seeker climbing "a long and narrow stair" until:

At last climbing a long and narrow stair He stood alone on the high roof of things And saw the light of a spiritual sun. Aspiring he transcends his earthly self; He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born… He reaches his fount of immortality, He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

The figure at the roof of things is the type of which Aswapati was an instance and Savitri is now becoming the next. The Parable is showing her where she stands in a sequence of climbers.

The application — what the Parable was for

The last twenty-five lines bring the cosmic vision down onto the woman sitting in trance:

All this the spirit concealed had done in her: A portion of the mighty Mother came Into her as into its own human part: Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme, Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit To mould humanity into God's own shape And lead this great blind struggling world to light Or a new world discover or create.

This is Sri Aurobindo's most direct statement so far in Book 7 of what Savitri is. She is the descent of a portion of the mighty Mother into a human part. The Parable was an unfolding of that descent's situation. The "wide-drawn scheme" of which she is the centre is the cosmic project of which Aswapati's yoga in Books 1–3 was the preparation and the descent in Book 4 was the beginning.

The conditions of the work are then named precisely:

But for such vast spiritual change to be, Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil And step into common nature's crowded rooms And stand uncovered in that nature's front And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

The heavenly Psyche — Sri Aurobindo's term in Savitri for the soul, the Purusha in the heart — has so far been veiled. The yoga's task is its unveiling. The image is exact: the soul stepping out of an inner chamber into the "common nature's crowded rooms" — the cluttered ordinary self — and standing in their front. Not a soul that retreats from the noise but a soul that walks into it and rules.

The closing posture

The canto closes with the picture of Savitri as the obedient instrument of the command:

Obedient to a high command she sat: Time, life and death were passing incidents Obstructing with their transient view her sight, Her sight that must break through and liberate the god Imprisoned in the visionless mortal man. The inferior nature born into ignorance Still took too large a place, it veiled her self And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

Time, life and death were passing incidents is the rhetorical reversal of where the canto began. The canto opened with her sleepless beside her husband, time and death pressing at her chest as the dominant facts. By its end they are passing incidents; the dominant fact is the work. The shift is the whole movement of the canto.

The last two lines name what the next canto will do. The inferior nature… must be pushed aside. Canto 3 is the entry into the inner countries where this pushing-aside begins.

Connections

This canto opens the work that The Joy of Union and the Ordeal of Foreknowledge declared impossible for the heart alone. The Voice from her own summit is the higher self that Aswapati spent four cantos to ascend toward in The Yoga of the King; here it comes down to Savitri as a single descending call, and is recognised. The cosmology of the layered self — Inconscient below, mind in the middle, superconscient above — restates in compressed form the architecture Aswapati walked through in The World-Stair and the cantos that follow. The dark inhabitants of the human house are the same forces named at length in The Descent into Night and confronted by Death in person in Books 9–11. The "portion of the mighty Mother" who acts in Savitri is The Divine Mother in her descended form, whose promise was made in The Vision and the Boon. The command to cast Thought… cast sense… conquer thy heart's throbs is the program of Cantos 3–7; then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death is the program of Books 9–11. The next canto, The Entry into the Inner Countries, begins the actual push past the surface self.

Open questions

Sources