EXPLORATIONS IN SAVITRI
THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE - 6
And now we come to a darker passage, in which the Author writes of the soul’s experience here in this world of material density where those previous Light-filled illuminations are hard to come by:
But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
Else to our waking mind’s small moment look
A goalless voyage seems our dubious course
Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,
Or a Necessity without aim or cause
Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
Our very being seems to us questionable,
Our life a vague experiment, the soul
A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,
The earth a brute mechanic accident,
A net of death in which by chance we live.
All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,
The achievement done a passage or a phase
Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,
A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.
Ever surround our brief existence here
Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;
The dark Inconscient’s signless mysteries
Stand up unsolved behind Fate’s starting-line.
An aspiration in the Night’s profound,
Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,
Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire
Towards an undying Light for ever lost;
Only it hears, sole echo of its call,
The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart
And meets, not understanding why it came
Or for what reason is the suffering here,
God’s sanction to the paradox of life
And the riddle of the Immortal’s birth in Time.
========
But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
These inner-gazing turns of consciousness were how the luminous discoveries shown earlier were achieved. Without them, we are sunk in the density of matter.
===========
Else to our waking mind’s small moment look
A goalless voyage seems our dubious course
Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,
Or a Necessity without aim or cause
Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
Our very being seems to us questionable,
Our life a vague experiment, the soul
A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,
The earth a brute mechanic accident,
A net of death in which by chance we live.
Our much-vaunted Age of Reason, with its materialist orthodoxy, leaves us with no greater vision or hope of validating Meaning than the bare material existence. But this existence can only be ascribed to a random happening: The sheer miracles of life and mind, the beauty of the natural world, the magnificence of love, and art, and literature, all are put down as emerging from the random arrangement of atoms and molecules with no apparent finer Cause or intelligence behind them.
All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,
The achievement done a passage or a phase
Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,
A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.
Ever surround our brief existence here
Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;
The dark Inconscient’s signless mysteries
Stand up unsolved behind Fate’s starting-line.
With no higher vision to guide us, humanity is left making more or less intelligent guesses as to our origins and doubtful future. We move from the unknown to the unknown, with no greater star to guide us on the way.
An aspiration in the Night’s profound,
Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,
Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire
Towards an undying Light for ever lost;
Only it hears, sole echo of its call,
The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart
And meets, not understanding why it came
Or for what reason is the suffering here,
God’s sanction to the paradox of life
And the riddle of the Immortal’s birth in Time.
Even the lonely aspiration for a higher Light and deeper meaning receives no helpful response from on high, only “The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart”. All seems a riddle of the question, if God exists, then why all this suffering and death? How could an all-powerful God allow the darkness of this world to continue to exist?
KarunDas
Lovely thoughts and words , thank you!
What a beautiful selection from Savitri! It perfectly captures my (most likely very naive) attempt to re-read science, philosophy, and spirituality from the perspective of the "intuitive heart" in my upcoming book. I strongly feel that everything is screened, subliminal, and mystical, and that we need to cultivate a "spiritual gaze." To the analytical scientific/philosophical mind, the world appears as a "goalless voyage" determined only by chance, at best ruled by "a Necessity without aim or cause, unwillingly compelled to emerge and be." This is my critique of Spinoza and modern thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup, who see in Nature only a blind will. We continue to view things from a perspective where the "earth [is] a brute mechanic accident," merely "a chance happening or a fortuitous fate." However, the world presents itself this way because we fail to nurture and develop the intuitive heart. Thank you, Karun Das! :)