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Before we proceed, we should review briefly the main issues that have emerged out of this debate between Savitri and her adversary in the previous instalment. Savitri has now declared in the following words the value of this world:

To create perfection here on earth is the real challenge. To create the gods in heavens is comparatively an easy matter; but earth offers real problems; it is still in the grip of the Inconscient, and to release life here from the hold of the adversary forces, is a glorious challenge.

In fact, there can be two different ways of looking at the world - in terms of its value for God and in terms its value for us. When we ask what its value to us is we tend to dismiss the world as "anityam, asukham" (transient and unhappy) and therefore we are tempted to use it at best as an instrument to strengthen our souls so that we get an entrance into an extraterritorial heaven. And when we regard it in terms of its value for Divine, we find it to be a challenging field for the fullest manifestation of his glory. Can the world be redeemed from its present state of imperfection and corruption and subjection to death and ignorance? Most spiritual philosophies have tended to answer this question in the negative. But here Savitri gives what is basically Sri Aurobindo's answer to this question. Not to escape from the world because of its imperfections but to live in it and to transform life on earth as we transform ourselves is the real challenge our manhood is supposed to take up.

The spirit is always immortal and is always free from death, imperfection, and sin and corruption. Why did it descend into the grip of time and space and consent to be bound by ignorance? What does it wish to achieve through such an act? Or should we conclude that the Divine's decision to manifest himself as this manifold world was a mistake and we should correct the Divine by trying to cop out of this world through the escape route of Nirvana?

Sri Aurobindo does not believe that it is the creator's intention that we should escape this world in order to escape misery and evil. He believes that it is the intention of Nature to conquer all imperfections and the pain we experience here is but a spur to our efforts to achieve this victory. As Kapali Sastry puts it in his Lights on the Fundamentals (Madras, Sri Aurobindo Library, 1950, p. 78.), the Divine potentialities of the Infinite Self are latent in the finite and it is the revelation of the Divine nature and infinitude hidden in the finite that is the purpose of the limitless Self discovering himself in limitation of the finite.

The second major problem a monistic philosophy has to answer is how does the Divine get entangled in this bondage to ignorance? Is it because he is under some kind of determination, necessity or need to create? Sri Aurobindo very clearly states that God's creation of the world is undertaken deliberately and in freedom. If the Divine does not have freedom to bind himself in the net of Ignorance for the joy of the play, lila, we will have to regard that the Divine is not entirely free. Savitri refers to this freedom the Divine feels in choosing to be bound:

The God of Death is rendered speechless by Savitri's replies to his questions about the reality and the value of the world. Notice that she adheres to the advaitic monism of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. So Death now takes up another line altogether. He says to her:

"Whoever you may really be , and however powerful you may be behind your human mask, O Savitri, your heart's passion cannot overrule the firm, established laws of the Gods that operate here. Satyavan is dead and will remain dead, that is the established rule of the Gods here. It is so firmly established here that you cannot hope to change it. Even if you are the Mother of the worlds behind your human mask, you will not be able to impose your will on the cosmic law which, you will find, is greater than your will. Even God obeys the laws he has made. The law abides, it cannot be changed. An individual person is after all only a temporary bubble on the sea of Time.

"You claim to be a forerunner of a greater Truth that is to come, and your soul is trying to create a freer law of its own. In doing so, you seem to be leaning on a Force and a Light no one but you have seen. And you are claiming the first fruits of this victory of this new power. But what is Truth? And when was her footfall last heard amid the endless clamour in the mart of time? And which is her voice amidst the thousand cries that crowd and pass through the listening brain and deceive the soul? Perhaps Truth is nothing but a high name, remote like a star. Or is it a vague and impressive word which serves to justify and rationalise man's desires? May be it is cloak man uses to hide his heart's wish, may be it is a preferred idea, most elected among the elect; may be it is the favourite thought among the many children born of the mind's half-light crowding the playground of the mind with their loud voices and filling its dormitories in their infant sleep!

"All things move here between God's Yes and No, two Powers real but to each other untrue. They are like two stars in the moonlit night of the mind gazing at two opposite horizons. They are like the white head and the black tail of the mystic drake (male duck) signifying the earth soul. They are the swift foot and the lame foot, the strong wing and the broken wing sustaining the body of this multidimensional dragon that is this uncertain world.

"Your high proud truth must live too dangerously in this world because it is entangled in the mortal littleness of Matter. All in this world that appears to be true turns out in the end to be false. Ultimately, all thoughts of this world culminate in an eternal zero, all deeds come to nothing in Time.

"For man is at once an animal and a god, a disparate (containing or made up of fundamentally different and often incongruous elements) enigma of God's make. There is a form of Godhead within but he is unable to liberate it from its imprisonment. Man is an aspiring animal, the frustrate god. ( A potential god, but in actuality something less than himself.) But he is neither wholly a beast not yet wholly a god; he is man but man bound to the labour of the earth to exceed herself, to climb the higher stairs of consciousness towards god's consciousness.

"In this world there are only appearances and no one knows what the truth about them is. Man's ideas are just so many guesses of a fallible god. Truth has no home on the irrational breast of earth. Yet without reason, life will become a tangle of dreams. But this reason is poised precariously above a dim abyss and stands at last upon a plank of doubt. Eternal truth cannot live in mortal beings, or if it lives within your heart show me the body of living truth, or draw for me at least the outline of her face so that I too may obey and worship her. If you can do that, I shall give back Satyavan to you.

"But here are only facts and the laws hard like steel. I know this truth - that Satyavan is dead and nothing can bring him back, not even your sweetness. There is no magic that can bring back the dead to life. There is no power on earth that can do this. Nothing, no joy of the heart, no bliss can persuade the past to live again.

"Life alone can comfort and fill the mute Void created by death and fill with thought the emptiness of Time. Leave your dead behind, and live a full life."

Savitri, the great World-Mother incarnate in a human body, answers to the mighty Shade, the dark figure of Death. And as she speaks her mortality disappears; the Goddess in her becomes visible in her eyes, like a dream of heaven Light glows on her face. And she says to the God of Death:

"O Death, you too are God and yet you are not quite that. You are his black shadow clinging to him as he leaves the Night of Nescience and takes the way upward, dragging with him the still clinging Inconscient force of the Night.

(This description of the God of Death as just now given by Savitri is very close to the spirit which he represents, or the Force he embodies in Sri Aurobindo's conception of him. In the traditional Indian system, Death is primarily Yama, the God who annihilates finite forms when their span of life on earth is over. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitr,i he is the representative of the Nescience from which this creation has evolved. He is interested in pulling this creation back towards the Nescience from which it was born.)

"O Death, you are the dark head of the unconsciousness of this creation; you are the unrepentant sign of the ignorance of this world, and the natural child of the dark womb of Ignorance, and you are therefore an unlucky bar on immortality.

"All contraries are aspects of God's face. The Many here are only the One showing itself innumerably. The One supreme Divine carries the multitude in His breast; He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, and sole; He is the one infinite Person seeing the world He has manifested. The Silence bears the Eternal's great dumb seal, and the eternal word is also inspired by His Light. The deep and deathless hush of the Immutable with its pure, featureless blank all-negating calm is He. And yet He Himself is the creator Self, the almighty Lord who watches His will executed by the gods who are His own forms. He watches the compelling desire goading the half-conscious man and also goading the reluctant and blind Night into movement.

"These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers, are the right and left side of the body of God. It is one Existence poised between two mighty arms that confronts the mind with unsolved profundities of thought. Below there is darkness, and above there is endless Light. The two contraries are joined in Light but the dividing Mind tears them asunder and they stand facing each other as opposites, ever in confrontation. The two contraries are indispensable for the great World-task of the Divine. They are the two poles whose opposite currents in their interaction awake the mighty immense World-Force.

"He stands above the world in the mighty secrecy of his Self and broods in concentration with equal wings; he assumes both the contraries in himself, and is without beginning or end. Transcending both of the contraries, he enters the state of Absolute. God's being is a mystery beyond mind, his ways bewilder mortal ignorance. The finite is parked in its little sections and is amazed by God's audacity and cannot believe that what it sees is true - that the Self can become the All and yet see and act as the one Infinite would.

"This seems to be the Absolute's offence against human reason - being known to be for ever unknowable, to be all and yet to transcend the mystic whole, to be the Absolute and yet dwell in a relative world of Time; to be the Eternal and all-knowing and yet to suffer birth as finite beings and things, to be omnipotent and yet appear to be sporting with Chance and Fate, to be the Spirit and yet to be matter and the Void, to be the illimitable, beyond form and name, yet to dwell within a body, to be the one and the supreme and yet to be animal, human and divine. The Supreme is still like the deep sea and yet he laughs in rolling waves, he is Universal, he is all and yet he is the transcendent, he is none.

(The Supreme Divine baffles the human intellect because He does not fit into its neat categories and is not bound to its logic of the finite. How is the Divine to be understood? Is He universal, transcendental or immanent and individual? How can He be all these three at the same time? Is He the Formless or does He always wear a form? If He is infinite, then why does He take birth only in finite things and beings? If He is omnipotent, why does He look so helpless in His finite individual forms? How can He be an animal, man and the divine at the same time? Is He the quiet, immobile depths of the ocean, or is He the ever-active waves on the surface of the ocean?)

"To man's sense of righteousness this seems to be God's cosmic crime - that although Almighty, He chooses to dwell beyond good and evil leaving the good to their fate in this wicked world and letting evil rule the immense scene. To those who see only a part and miss the whole, all this creation appears to be a vast, aimless labour with but scanty result, everywhere there seems to be opposition, strife and dance. People scan only the surfaces, the depths do not yield to their search. The world confronts and challenges us either as a hybrid mystery or as a sordid miracle.

(There are two kinds of people who are baffled by the Divine. We have just seen how he baffles those who depend on their reason and intellect to make sense of this world. The second category of people who are committed to righteousness. They expect God at least to be as moral as they are. How can God the Almighty let the evil triumph more often than the Good in this world? Why does he not do anything about it? Does he not hold the same moral values that we hold, or is he totally indifferent to the good and the evil? Why is there so much strife and suffering in a world controlled by a kind and benevolent God? Does he not care enough or is he too weak to help even if he cared? These are some of the grounds which built up the case for atheism and the denial of God, particularly in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As we have already seen, Sri Aurobindo has an entirely different notion of the Divine and how and why the Divine created this universe. He just did not create this universe outside of himself, with the substance too which is outside of himself. He became the world. If there is imperfection and suffering and death in this world, it is god himself who is undergoing this experience. He is not sending these experiences to the inhabitants of the world while he is exempt from them. So Sri Aurobindo's God is not morally culpable on that account. The real question then is why does the Divine choose to go through this experienced of pain, suffering and death? So while an answer to this question has still to be found, and Sri Aurobindo has answered this question in The Life Divine, the fact that there is evil and imperfection in the world, or the fact that God is beyond our rationality, are not arguments that can be used to dismiss his very existence.)

"Yet in this seeming exactness of the workings of the Inconscient, in the careless error of the world's ignorance, one sees a plan, a hidden intelligence. There is a purpose in each stumble and fall. Even in what looks like the most careless, lazy movement of Nature is only an appearance, a posturing preparing behind it some forward step, some significant result.

"Individual events and happenings are like cleverly designed notes woven into a purposive composition - they may look discordant but are in fact they are the tiny notes of a harmonious whole, which is a huge orchestral dance of Nature's evolution.

"A supreme Truth has brought this world into being; it has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud - a shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance. It compelled the suns to burn through silent space; they are like the flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought in a wide brooding ether's formless muse. It made of Knowledge an obscured and struggling light, of luminous being into an Inconscient, dense and dumb substance, Bliss into the beauty of an insentient world.

"The conscious infinite lives in finite things. When it gets involved (the process of involution, which precedes evolution), it sleeps in Matter's helpless trance. It rules the world even when it is asleep in Matter's senseless Void. From its dreaming state, it throws out mind and heart and soul which struggle and labour in their crippled and bound conditions on the hard earth, inhospitable to them. This fragmented whole works through many scattered points. Its broken pieces are the thoughts of wisdom which glisten like diamonds and its shadowy reflex is our ignorance here.

"The Infinite starts its evolutionary journey from the dumb Inconscient Matter in numberless jets in innumerable points, and throws itself out in countless forms; out of physical brain and nerve, it shapes a conscient being and from the pleasures and pain of life it develops a sentient creature. The physical form is a bundle of obscure feelings, a sensitive bundle of matter; it survives the various shocks to its existence. Either by being crushed or getting exhausted otherwise, it dies and departs from the huge universe in which it lives but only as an insignificant, inconsequential guest. But all the while, the soul grows concealed within its house. It gives to the body its strength and its greatness. In this ignorant and aimless world, the soul follows its own aims and lends significance to earth's otherwise meaningless life."

We have now reached the mid-point in Savitri's long discourse on integral philosophy which is intended to answer all the questions the God of Death might have for her.

(Mangesh Nadkarni retired as professor of Linguistics a few years ago. He enjoys sharing with as many people as possible what he receives from his study of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother)