Summary on Savitri by Dr. M.P Pandit

Book Two Canto X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

Above the paradise of Life are the realms of Mind, tranquil, still.

First, Aswapathy finds a silver-grey expanse parting the flow of Life from the poise of Thought, a meeting ground of Knowledge and Ignorance. At the lower end there is a dim, small-range mind ever turned outward—the material mind. This mind sees everything in terms of Matter and lives from moment to moment in its search for Knowledge.

Above this belt he steps into the realm of an early Sun out of whose rays the mind has come to be formed. Here an Intelligence is at work mediating between the Supermind above and the Nescience below, linking up gross Matter and its forms with the Consciousness looming from above. It enables Matter to think. Its field is still Ignorance; Knowledge is not yet in its grasp. This reasoning Intelligence with its instrument of logic cuts up Truth into bits and erects a wholly artificial pattern of the universe. However, invasion of Light from above in the form of intuitions, inspirations, myths, effect a breakthrough and living Knowledge begins to take shape and lead the earth onward.

Here are the first forward movements of the mind, searching for Knowledge, looking for fresh discoveries. Her first task is to teach Ignorance to awake to the Knowledge within. But mind itself must first learn to recognise the truth beyond the many transient truths glimpsed by it. The mind has indeed worked, though cautiously, for the growth of the Light of Knowledge and has cut a passage from the Night of Inconscience towards the Light of Omniscience.

There are three gradations of this Mind-Power: the physical mind, the life or desire-mind, the reasoning mind. Of these the first is the mechanical mind ever exposed to its habitual grooves of movement, inert, unchanging, repetitive, limited to physical forms and senses. This has its role in creation: to fix things in type. All movement, all new influx, is arrested and reduced by this power to its own established pattern.

Next comes the desire-mind, ever on the move, claiming everything as food for its hunger. Imaginative, adventurous, impulsive, it is never satisfied, never content with what is gained. It darts forth in force and often catches what calm intelligence would miss. Instinct and intuition play a good part in its action.

The last and the greatest of these powers is Reason. She looks upon the universe as an object to be studied and analysed piece by piece and seeks to impose a logical order and system on everything. She finds out the process of Nature and tries to remove Ignorance and harmonise all by thought.

Much that is not on the surface escapes Reason. She conceptualises what she sees and weaves webs of abstract thought in her attempt to explain things. Indeed she releases herself from the trap of the senses but she cannot break out of the walls of the limited mind. Her constricted knowledge is shadowed by doubt and at some time or other is questioned and breaks down. There is no finality to her knowledge, she cannot perceive the whole Truth at the same time.

Her labours are inconclusive. She can support with care and with equal care demolish the same. Her first reading of the material universe is that it is the working of a huge self-operating machinery, unconscious and mechanical. Life and Consciousness—such as they are—are products of this action; spirit, mystic feelings, etc. are all fancies; Matter is the sole reality.

But this Thought breaks down at the first touch of the Unseen. Flashes from the Unknown startle this Mind and open her eyes to glimpses of other realities. The ground beneath her is pulled out. All reveals itself to be the movement of a Force, a clash and strife, a dance of Kali. Reason wonders if Force is the final certitude and she seeks to grasp this Power and organise all life into an order, to cut out all things into a standardised perfection. But the elaborate constructions of Reason are upset by fresh heavings of Knowledge from within and new prospects open up of linking up Earth and Heaven, Life and Spirit, the finite and the Infinite.

Awakened Reason is aware of the greater reality behind the surfaces of things, beyond her stretchings of conceptual logic. She is aware that her best is only a half knowledge.

Reason is not the creator, nor is Reason capable of seeing the whole Truth. What Reason is occupied with is only the outer robe, form, not the real body of Truth. She cuts up the Indivisible. Her knowings are only the husks of the grains of Knowledge that wait within. Announcers of the greater Truth, agents of the completer Knowledge arrive time and again—inspirations and intuitions that are the harbingers of the vaster Gnosis.

Above these three spheres stand two more Powers of the Mind: the Life-Thought which breaks down the little walls built by the three smaller powers and soars wide and far, mapping vistas beyond the normal ranges of the labouring mind, and the pure Thought-Mind, luminous in its transcendent status, impassively surveying the cosmic act.