Summary on Savitri by Dr. M.P Pandit

Book One Canto V: The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness


Armed with secret Knowledge, Aswapati cuts off his moorings in material nature and enters swiftly into the bright realm of the Spirit where all knowledge is spontaneous, ready without the labouring processes of the mind; where the laws of material life exercise no sway. Here he finds clues to all that is mysterious in the material universe; here stands revealed the meaning of the world-movement, the Plan according to which Spirit and Nature work out the Divine Intention in the Cosmos.

Admitted to this secret of the riddle of existence, Aswapati casts his look upward to heights unseen hitherto. He is no more satisfied with things that served him ere now; he has seen that what obtains in terrestrial life is only a caricature of the pattern in the domain of the Spirit and he seeks to win that world for his home.

He withdraws his consciousness from the din of the old life-movements on earth and dwells in a Silence that opens into the vasts beyond earthly Time and Space. An immunity of Power, Knowledge and Bliss invades his being and sucks him up into the infinitudes above. There, shorn of his humanity, he is bathed in the waters of a divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Ecstasy. His limits are erased, his faculties undergo a transforming change, his soul widens to cosmic dimensions.

Nature reveals herself to his veil-free sight as a conscious Power, with a force that is omnipotent, executing a marvellous design of the Soul. She lays open to his illumined Will her whole field of workings, from the rigidities of the material base and form of her making to the sovereign plasticities of her Mind and potencies of her Will which link the finite to the Infinite.

On the threshold of these occult worlds beyond the earth-scene Aswapati regards a guarding Power behind whom stands an ineffable Divine Presence.

Here begin the domains of the Infinite, the Eternal, realms leading from Light to greater Light. Here also comes to his sight the giant order that underlines the system of worlds that constitute this Creation. He perceives the stair of the descending and the ascending planes of consciousness formed in the course of the evolution and the evolution of the Divine Spirit and up which the Soul in the universe travels forging its growth to its full stature in the Divine Glory.

He further sees the world of Light, the Mahas, the world of plenary Truth-Consciousness, the Truth, the Right, the Vast, which in its lower ranges is the source all the worlds below and in its upper reaches opens into the infinities of Sat-Chit-Ananda. Here is the Wisdom that reconciles all the warring truths in the domain of Ignorance and is the source of all Revelation, Inspiration and Illumination; here is where the Eternal casts itself into Time, where the One organises itself into the Many. Beyond is the One in its infinitude. Into these Countries of the Unknown adventures Aswapati.