Summary on Savitri by Dr. M.P Pandit

Book Two Canto IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life

It is a hesitating and unsure world that slowly comes into being where Life meets Matter. There is a stir of the force of a veiled consciousness which is involved in the inconscience; it struggles to find itself and find a hold on things. This world breathes and strives between the pain of earth below and the bliss of heaven above from which life has fallen.

The hunger of the life-force is added to the hunger of the earth and there is a great unrest which expresses itself as a ceaseless craving in men. With the advent of life all repose is gone. Man is seized with desire, with passion for what he has not. Otherwise he could have stayed content like plants and animals. And because he is unhappy thus, he aspires, he seeks and progresses. He explores life without, turns to explore it within; he builds up mind and self in his being and grows into a master of the Nature of whom he was a prisoner before.

When Life enters Matter she exerts pressure and compels the unconscious Force in Matter to emerge. There is a general awakening and sensation comes to be. In the absence of thought, instinct guides the movement. Life brings the compulsion to move and to grow and spreads herself slowly searching to realise her innate bliss which she has lost here.

Aswapathy follows the course taken by Life and traces her obscure start on earth where she is close to Death and the Night of Nescience. She uses death for her own survival. Here is the nadir of her fall.

Here where life starts her career in matter, Aswapathy finds there is no solid ground to stand upon, no meaningful movement either. All is tentative. Forms are a-making and when they are shaped, there is impact between form and form resulting in the outbreak of sense and instinct. Forces clash and there is a general struggle for survival. Sensations, feelings, appear and disappear. All seems to be a vain agitation.

But Aswapathy sees a purpose behind this seeming uselessness, a work being done in spite of all the apparent aimlessness. A Force has been released from the dense sleep of Matter into the domain of life; there is a slow emergence of consciousness from under the veil of nescience. All moves under the irresistible urge for change, for the manifestation of what is concealed.

He traces the course of this incessant movement to its source where he becomes aware of the presence of a Creative Power which seeks to manifest the Spirit in Matter, the Soul in the body through the intermediacy of life. Behind this Power is the play of God’s Delight in Creation, in manifestation. This basic Delight is at the root of all the movements of the body, the life-force and the mind towards joy and bliss. Whether by aggregation or by devouring, life seeks to multiply its delight.

Aswapathy watches here the first attempts of the will-to-delight to effectuate itself and the handicaps imposed on it by the very obscure nature of Matter in which it has to function. However, through these persistent efforts with all the clampings of the nether force on it, the imprisoned consciousness emerges a little by little, gathers itself and begins to look upward to the Light above.

When the creative Spirit plunged at the culmination of its devolution into a Nescience, all would have been lost but for the special descent of the Supreme Being of Sat-Chit-Ananda into that negative Void, a descent which resulted in a striking charge of Being into Void, of Conscious-Force into Nescience, of Delight into Pain. This contradiction forms the basis of life in this creation.

Thus starts the slow aeonic game of hide and seek between the hidden Soul and obscure Nature. Across the successive stages of evolution it continues till in the mind the struggling Energy of Nature emerges into the wider fields of Consciousness to meet the Being face to face.

Aswapathy regards a mighty Spirit concealed in Nature; he feels the response of Matter to the breath of the soul, sees the slow birth of a great Force and follows its course of growth.

Now, after the weak, tentative beginnings of life in the domain of Matter, Aswapathy sees the more definitive play of waking life. Life takes strange forms in which thinking sense begins to function. A sensational order of life-creation comes into existence in the forms of the insect, the small and the bigger animals, the python, the dragon, the mastodon and the mammal; small human beings also appear. In man, Nature arrives at a high point in her evolutionary labour; a new stage in the growth of Consciousness begins with Nature becoming self-aware in man.

In the animal creation around man, however, the play of consciousness is perceived in the reactions of creatures to impacts from outside. Their life is driven by some need. The little mind that is there looks upon the environment as hostile; it is primarily a sense-mind which cannot think on its own.

Even in men, at this stage, the sense-mentality governs. They live from moment to moment drawing as much joy from Nature as possible. The pleasures of the body are all that matter to them. Thought and reflection are not yet. They are solely occupied with guarding themselves in a hostile world dominated by Death. Theirs is a small physical life built upon limited association for self-interest and, for the rest, unlimited slaughter and plunder. Communities clash and war with each other.

Through this wrestle of life with All-Life grow the faculties of the concealed consciousness. Instinct, memory, adaptive skill, form themselves on the way to self-discovery. At this stage, however, the evolving life has not yet developed the mind proper. What functions is the life-mentality, mind involved in life. Search for the joy of existence, labour to build suitable embodiments for this rapture of sense is predominant.

Next, Aswapathy sees a third order of life-creation. The mind proper is under formation as a result of pressure from the Mind-plane. Thought begins to enlighten act.

At first the mind-power works engulfed in the flow of embodied life. There is no overt thinking. Sensations, feelings, sub-conscious willings and desires abound. Gradually a seeing Power gathers their confused movements around one luminous point of awareness and forces the life-current to flow into form and shape, fashions the life-mind in creatures.

Life assures herself by building walls of safety against the siege of death. Knowledge begins to move in the field of Nescience, and the soul takes a definite existence in form. A restricted intelligence begins to act. A reason functions in the mould of a habitual Nature ruled by Ignorance. Thought moves within the narrow grooves of the segmented life. Its range and vision, however, are restricted to parts and aspects which it mistakes for the whole. The mind is still slave to the body.

Out of these small, obscure beginnings mind grows into a gleam of clarity though enclosed in a mass of Ignorance. Led by this slender thinking power, life continues her monotonous play tied to her ground, running her common rounds. The nature and scope of her play in her own world does not change as it does in the earth-world. For her own world is set to type, fixed in its mould, not governed by the law of evolution and change.