⁠Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol ⁠by Sri Aurobindo, Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto 2 The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, pp. 103-107

0:01 In the impalpable field of secret self, this little outer being's vast support parted from vision by Earth's solid fence, he came into a magic crystal air and found a life that lived not by the flesh, a light that made visible immaterial things a fine degree in wonders, hierarchy. The Kingdom of subtle matters, fairy craft outlined against a sky of vivid hues, leaping out of a splendor, trance and haze, the wizard revelation of its front. A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours, where, undisguised by Earth's deforming sight, all shapes are beautiful and all things true.

0:52 In that lucent ambience, mystically clear, the eyes were doors to a celestial sense, hearing was music and the touch a charm, and the heart drew a deeper breath of power. There dwell earth, nature's shining origins, the perfect plans on which she moulds her works, the distant outcomes of her travailing force. Repose in a framework of established fate, attempted vainly now, or one in vain already, were mapped and scheduled there. The time and figure of her future sovereignties in the sumptuous lineaments traced by desire, the golden issue of mind's labyrinth plots, the riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives, unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought, abide in that pellucid atmosphere. Our vague beginnings are overtaken there, our middle term sketched out in prescient lines, our finished ends anticipated live.

2:02 This brilliant roof of our descending plain, intercepting the free boon of heaven's air, admits small inrushes of a mighty breath, or fragrant circuits through gold lattices. Its Shields our sealing of terrestrial mind from deathless Suns and the streaming of God's reign. It canalizes a stranged Irish glow and bright dews drip from the immortal sky. A passage for the powers that move our days. A cult behind this grocer, nature's walls, a gossamer marriage hall of mind with form is hidden by a tapestry of dreams.

2:46 Heaven's meaning steel through it as through a veil. Its inner sight sustains this outer scene, a finer consciousness with happier lines it has attacked. Our touch cannot attain a purity of sense we never feel. Its intercession with the Eternal ray inspires our transient earth's brief lived attempts at beauty and the perfect shape of things in rooms of the young divinity of power and early play of the Eternal Child. The embodiments of his out winging thoughts laved in a bright everlasting wondrous tints and lulled by whispers of that lucid air, take dream hued rest like birds on timeless trees before they dive to float on earth times sea.

3:41 All that here seems has lovelier semblance there. Whatever our hearts conceive, our heads create some high original beauty, forfeiting thence exiled here consents to an earthly tinge. Whatever is here, a visible charm and grace, finds there its faultless and immortal lines. All that is beautiful here is there. Divine figures are there, undreamed by mortal mind. Bodies that have no earthly counterpart traverse the inner eyes illumined trance and ravish the heart with their celestial tread, persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere.

4:25 The future's marvels wander in its gulfs. Things old and new are fashioned in those depths. A carnival of beauty crowds the heights in that magic Kingdom of ideal sight. In its anti chambers of splendid privacy, matter and soul, in conscious union meet like lovers in a lonely secret place. In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate, they join their strength and sweetness and delight and mingling make the high and low worlds one intruder from the formless infinite. Daring to break into the in conscience rain, the spirits leap towards body touches ground as yet unwrapped in earthly lineaments.

5:16 Already it wears, outlasting death and birth, convincing the abyss by heavenly form, a covering of its immortality, alive to the lustre of the wearer's rank, Fit to endure the rub of change and time. A tissue mixed of the soul's radiant light and matters. Substance of sign, burdened force imagined vainly in our minds, thin air an abstract phantasm, mould of mental make. It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel, and is more real than this grosser frame after the falling of mortality's cloak.

6:01 Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent. Refined to the touch of finer environments, it drops old patterned palls of denser stuff, cancels the grip of earth's descending pole, and bears the soul from world to higher world, till in the naked ether of the peaks the spirit simplicity alone is left the eternal Being's first transparent robe. But when it must come back to its mortal load and the hard ensemble of Earth's experience, then its return resumes that heavier dress. For long before Earth's solid vest was forged by the technique of the atomic void, a lucent envelope of self disguise was woven round the secret spirit in things the subtle realms. From those bright sheaths are made this wonder world, with all its radiant boon of vision and inviolate happiness, only for expression, cares, and perfect form. Fair on its peaks it has dangerous nether plains. Its light draws towards the verge of nature's laps. It lends beauty to the terror of the gulfs and fascinating eyes to perilous gods.

7:28 Invests with grace the demon and the snake. Its trance imposes Earth's in conscience immortal. It weaves for us death's somber robe and authorizes our mortality. This medium serves a greater consciousness, a vessel of its concealed autocracy. It is the subtle ground of matters worlds. It is the immutable in their mutable forms. In the folds of its creative memory it guards the deathless type of perishing things. Its lower potencies found our fallen strengths, its thought invents our reasoned ignorance.

8:12 Its sense fathers our bodies reflexes, our secret breath of untried mightier force, the lurking sun of an instant's inner sight. Its fine suggestions are a covert fount for our iridescent rich imaginings, touching things common with transfiguring hues, till even earth's mud grows rich and warm with the skies and a glory gleams from the soul's decadence. Its knowledge is our error's starting point. Its beauty Dons our mud mask, ugliness its artist good begins our evil's tale.

8:54 A heaven of creative truths above a cosmos of harmonious dreams between a chaos of dissolving forms below it plunges, lost in our inconscient base. Out of its fall our denser matter came.