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Introduction to The Descent into Night

 Yesterday was Sri Aurobindo's birthday - one of those four days when he used to give public darshan. In his Savitri, he describes vividly and mystically the darkness of our lower nature and the world in Canto 7 (The Descent into Night) and 8 (The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness) of the Book 2 (The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds). As I sat reading some of these lines I was shown to my gaze how humanity is blinded in those glamours, illusions and maya (which we saw in a table the other day) being driven as puppets by that dark lodge (forces of materialism) which DK describes extensively.    


In “The Descent into Night”, Savitri's father, King Aswapati (which is symbolic of our inner intense spiritual endeavour), traveling the worlds (we the aspirers are these travellers symbolically), turns to find the cause of Life's failure to bring her (Divine Mother or Savitri or symbolically the Hierarchy as her messenger) own divinity into Matter -


"A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know,

A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,

The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,

He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.



...


The veil was rent that covers Nature’s depths:

He saw the fount of the world’s lasting pain

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;

The evil guarded at the roots of life

Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.


...


A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,

A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,

A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,

A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,

Seemed to engender and to slay the world.


...

...


Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core:

Altering its form the life remained the same.

A capital was there without a State:

It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.

There each in his own darkness walked alone:

Only they agreed to differ in Evil’s paths,

To live in their own way for their own selves

Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;

There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat

And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:

The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.

Injustice justified by firm decrees

The sovereign weights of Error’s legalised trade,

But all the weights were false and none the same;

Ever she watched with her balance and a sword,

Lest any sacrilegious word expose

The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.

In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide

And licence stalked prating of order and right:

There was no altar raised to Liberty;

True freedom was abhorred and hunted down:

Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen;

Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law.

A frame of ethics knobbed with scriptural rules

Or a theory passionately believed and praised

A table seemed of high Heaven’s sacred code."

...


-Savitri (The Descent into night)



HPB writes that we are going deeper in Kali-yuga since Krishna's (The Monad Maitreya's or Christ's last physical embodiment) death. DK and AAB wrote towards the end of second world-war that evil (or the black lodge) is temporarily defeated yet it will be back. JMH and Cyril Scott term these times as a dark cycle. 


We ask how to get out of this mess ? 


The answer has been given in the works of HPB and Roerich (line of least resistance for Ray 1 disciples), DK and AAB (line of least resistance for Ray 2 disciples), Sri Aurobindo (line of least resistance for Ray 4 and 6 disciples) and such initiates being sent by the Christ/Maitreya/Krishna-Kalki before he comes himself (overshadowed by an even greater Avatar of Synthesis when the separative tendency of humanity would have reached pinnacle) establishing firmly the future yoga of synthesis (leading to the cave in each of us within whose circumscribing walls the pairs of opposites will be known, and the secret of good and evil will be once again revealed on a higher turn of the spiral). 


Image: Nicholas Roerich’s The Burning of Darkness (1924): The Pyre of Darkness that Emboldens the Consciousness of the Cosmic Stone.



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