A synthesis of Savitri and Theosophy - Paintings No 4 & 5

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 "An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.

As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek

Reminded of the endless need in things

The heedless Mother of the universe,

An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

Insensibly somewhere a breach began:

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep."


An unevolved and unshaped consciousness (Ray 2) is desirous of the light and has a foreknowledge of the distant goal of fulfilment (Ray 1 Divine purpose). At it current stage in evolution it is a like a longing infant who lays a finger on the cheek of a seemingly unmindful Divine mother as portrayed by Huta. The desert heart and obscure sleep of the matter is being breached by a tinge at the dawn.



"Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;

A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,

It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,

The torpor of a sick and weary world,

To seek for a spirit sole and desolate

Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

And, conquering Nature’s disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.

A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,

A sense was born within the darkness’ depths,

A memory quivered in the heart of Time

As if a soul long dead were moved to live:

But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,

Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,

And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt

And old experience laboured out once more."


The eye of deity as depicted in the painting is compared to a soldier being sent out by the Central spiritual Sun in order to survey the depths of lethargy of tired consciousness of the world which is so grim that it has even forgotten the original bliss from where it has come. The next lines remind us again of the earlier failures hidden in the long gone ages of the evolution on the moon chain. As per theosophy there had been a systemic failure in that chain, where the Lords of the Dark inconscient forces for a time achieved a sort of success. This time is expected to end only in the fifth round of our current evolutionary earth chain. This explains present evil conditions on this planet as well as of misery, pain and of distress. This is the memory which Sri Aurobindo says trembles in the heart of Time. Those inscribed marks or stains of old failed labours and experiences of destruction and fall long dead must be reconquered by the soul. It is again being compelled to renew the adventure of evolution in this cycle dawning now. 


Images: Meditations on Savitri paintings no 4 and 5 in Book 1, Canto 1.




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