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Beginning of Canto Two and the lonely life of a 4th Degree Initiate

 At the end of the last canto, 'The symbol dawn' Savitri wakes up gathering the entire might of her soul to face that fateful doom of Satyavan when Lord Yama of death will claim his soul. Now begins Canto Two: The Issue 


Page 11, Savitri (A Legend, Symbol, the Mantric Epic of Sri Aurobindo): 


AWHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,

Her mind moved in a many-imaged past

That lived again and saw its end approach:

Dying, it lived imperishably in her;

Transient and vanishing from transient eyes,

Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

It bore the future on its phantom breast.


Sri Aurobindo says: Silent for a little while thinking, Savitri's mind saw many images from the past. Experiencing that lasting past in her consciousness once more, She saw the end of Satyavan approaching. Short-lived and disappearing from her eyes, invisible like a fateful image of a ghost, yet carrying the doom of future on its breast. 

 

An absolute supernatural darkness falls

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

An hour comes when fail all Nature’s means;

Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

And flung back on his naked primal need,

He at length must cast from him his surface soul

And be the ungarbed entity within:

That hour had fallen now on Savitri.


In these verses, Sri Aurobindo describes in general how an awakening is experienced by a chosen man. When that man comes near to his own God Self, often an absolute darkness much deeper than a physical night is seen. A time comes when all Nature's usual ways start collapsing for him. Nothing in the outer world can be of any help and the protecting illusion of everyday consciousness is torn off. Man becomes aware of his most basic fundamental need which is to stand on the strength of his own divine nature. The surface soul here refers to the lower self or the personality which is then abandoned by the true soul or the higher self. That time had come for Savitri. The Mother sketches Savitri in that state of her true higher self and Huta paints in her studio. 



Pertaining to these lines, we find a synthesis with the following words of Djwal Khul where he teaches that the initiate (or the Divine messenger) of fourth degree (an example being H.P Blavatsky and Brother R of Vicente Beltran Anglada) stands alone:   

 

"Therefore - under the law - there comes always to the striver after the Mysteries and the manipulator of the law, a period of aloneness and of sorrow when no man stands by and isolation is his lot. In lesser degree this comes to all, and to the arhat (or initiate of the fourth degree) this complete isolation is a characteristic feature. He stands midway between life in the three worlds and that in the world of adepts. His vibration does not synchronise, prior to initiation with the vibrations of either group. Under the law he is alone, But this is only temporary."


"The form of the causal body is the vehicle of the higher consciousness, the temple of the indwelling God, which seems of a beauty so rare and of a stability of so sure a nature that, when the final shattering comes of even that masterpiece of many lives, bitter indeed is the cup to drink, and unutterably bereft seems the unit of consciousness. Conscious then only of the innate Divine Spirit, conscious only of the Truth of the Godhead, realizing profoundly and to the depths of his being the ephemeral nature of the form and of all forms, standing alone in the vortex of initiatory rites, bereft of all on which he may have leant (be it friend, Master, doctrine or environment), well may the Initiate cry out: "I am that I am, and there is naught else." Well may he then figuratively place his hand in that of his Father in Heaven, and hold the other out in blessing on the world of men, for only the hands that have let slip all within the three worlds are free to carry the ultimate blessing to struggling humanity." 


- A treatise on the white magic.


Image: A lonely Himalayan peak symbolic of a fourth degree initiate.





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