The stade between a death and birth
Let us see the following sentence from The Book of Yoga, Book Seven Canto Five of Savitri:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live. ||127.30||
It is the same in the Centenary and Revised Editions of Savitri p. 531.
Let us first scan these lines:
In the| slow pro|+cess of| the e+volv|+ing spir+it,|
In the| brief stade| be+tween| a death| and birth|
A first| per+fec|+tion’s stage| is reached| at last;|
Out of| the wood| and stone| of our na|+ture’s stuff|
A tem|+ple is shaped| where the| high gods| could live.| 127.30
The first two lines open with pyrrhic-spondee, — with an emphatic repetition,”slow” and “brief” carrying each other — and then iamb-iamb, trochee-iamb, and iamb-anapæst, making the rhythm felicitous for the high gods. Three occurrences of pyrrhic-spondee are enchanting. Add to that the presence of four trisyllabic feet in the passage, three anapæsts one amphibrach, and we get a metrical suppleness that makes poetry move with elegance and charm.
But the question is, what is a stade? what are wood and stone?
The stadion (plural stadia, Greek: στάδιον; latinized as stadium), also anglicized as stade, was an ancient Greek unit of length, consisting of 600 Ancient Greek feet (podes). 100 podes made up one plethron, 600 podes made up a stade (the Greek furlong) and 5000 made up a milion (the Greek mile). The Greek pous also has long, median and short forms. It is an ancient measure of length, a stadium. One Greek foot, pous: 0.308 m, a Roman foot is 0.296 m, an Egyptian foot is 0.300 m (16 fingers) One Athens stadium is 240 Greek steps, 600 Greek feet; this unit was used for the Roman stadium: 185 m, note this value is also equal to 1/10 nautical mile (or 1/10 of a minute of latitude); it is still in use today as a ‘cable’. This unit was used by Pliny and by Strabo. The course for the footrace in the ancient Olympic Games at Olympia was exactly a stade in length, and the word for the unit of measurement became transferred first to the footrace and then to the place in which the race was run. As a type of structure, the stadium played a significant role in 20th-century construction technology. [From the Internet]
But in the context of the Savitri-sentence it is more appropriately a stage in a journey. Here the stage is between death and birth, the stage of assimilation of life-experiences and preparing for the next birth. We may get some idea from the following:
Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds. ||77.11||
An interval was left twixt act and act,
Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,
A pause that gave new strength to do and be. ||77.12||
Beyond were regions of delight and peace,
Mute birth-places of light and hope and love,
And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose. ||77.13||
In a slumber of the voices of the world
He of the eternal moment grew aware;
His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense
Knew by identity without thought or word,
His being saw itself without its veils,
Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity. ||77.14||
Along a road of pure interior light,
Alone between tremendous Presences,
Under the watching eye of nameless Gods,
His soul passed on, a single conscious power
Towards the end which ever begins again,
Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm
To the source of all things human and divine. ||77.15||
The Mother has spoken about it in great detail in the Questions & Answers. For instance:
Someone has asked me a question about death: what happens after death and how one takes a new body. “When an especially developed soul leaves the body, does it take with it the subtle physical sheath? When it reincarnates, how does it introduce this into the new body?”
To answer this, it would be necessary to write volumes or speak for hours. “These questions are asked with reference to an old Indian tradition, the occult knowledge of the sage-king Pravanahana who is mentioned in the Upanishads (Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka): “It is said that after death, the soul of one who has done good deeds takes the path of the ancestors, ‘pitriyana’, it becomes smoke, night, etc., attains to the world of the fathers and finally to the lunar paradise. The Brahmasutra deduces from this that the soul takes with it all the elements, even those of the subtle physical, which will be needed in the next incarnation.” “Then the Upanishads add: after having exhausted the store of good deeds, the soul leaves the lunar paradise, reaches the sky, then the air, then the clouds, taking on the nature of each of these things, precipitates on the earth as rain, enters the seeds, penetrates the body of the father in the form of food, and finally builds up the body of the child.” This is really a rather complicated process, isn’t it? (Laughter) But I found it very amusing.
I may say that I have been present at innumerable incarnations of evolved souls in beings either preparing to be born or already born. As I said, the cases are quite different; it depends more on psychological conditions than on material ones, but it also depends on material conditions. It depends on the state of development of the soul which wants to reincarnate, on the milieu in which it is going to incarnate, on the mission it has to fulfil―that makes many different conditions…. It depends very largely on the state of consciousness of the parents. If the incarnation takes place at the conception, the whole formation of the child to be born is directed and governed by the consciousness which is going to incarnate: the choice of the elements, the attraction of the substance―a choice of the forces and even the substance of the matter which is assimilated. There is already a selection. So, the soul which wants to incarnate stays at times in a domain of the higher mind, quite close to the earth, having chosen its future home; or else it can descend further, into the vital, and from there have a more direct action; or again it can enter the subtle physical and very closely govern the development of its future body.
In a more general way, with regard to the external envelope of the being, everything depends on its attitude at the moment of death, and that attitude necessarily depends on its inner development and its unification.
If we take the best instance, of someone who has unified his being completely around the divine Presence within him, who is now only one will, one consciousness, this person will have grouped around his central psychic being a fully developed and organised mind, an absolutely surrendered and collaborating vital and an obedient, docile and supple physical being. This physical being, as it is fully developed, will have a subtle body—what Sri Aurobindo calls the “true physical”—which will infinitely surpass the limits of its body and have enough suppleness, plasticity, balance to be able to adhere to the inner parts of the being and follow the movement of the soul in its… I don’t want to say in its ascent, but in its peregrinations outside the body. What the soul will do, where it will go—it all depends on what it has decided before leaving the body. And this capacity to keep around itself the being that has been fully organised and unified in its physical life, will allow it to really choose what it wants to do. And then, if its work has been well done and the parts or sheaths of its being which it has left in their different domains have acted as they should there, when it descends again, it will put on one after another all these parts which lived with it in a former life, and with this wealth of knowledge and experience it will prepare to enter a new body…. This may be after hundreds or thousands of years, for in those domains all that is organised is no longer necessarily subject to the deposition which here we call “death”. As soon as a vital being is fully harmonised, it becomes immortal. What dissolves it and breaks it up are all the disorders within it and all the tendencies towards destruction and deposition; but if it is fully harmonised and organised and, so to say, divinised, it becomes immortal. It is the same thing for the mind. And even in the subtle physical, beings who are fully developed and have been impregnated with spiritual forces do not necessarily dissolve after death. They may continue to act or may take a beneficial rest in certain elements of Nature like water—generally it is in some liquid, in water or the sap of trees—or it may be, as described here (laughing), in the clouds. But they may also remain active and continue to act on the more material elements of physical Nature. [This is freely paraphrased and for exact details refer to the original.]
And in Savitri Book Two Canto Fourteen, The World-Soul:
Immersed in voiceless internatal trance
The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there
In shining chambers of spiritual sleep. ||77.1||
Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,
Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,
Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;
They had returned into the world’s deep soul. ||77.2||
All now was gathered into pregnant rest:
Person and nature suffered a slumber change. ||77.3||
In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,
In a background memory’s foreseeing muse
Prophetic of new personality
Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course:
Heirs of their past, their future’s discoverers,
Electors of their own self-chosen lot,
They waited for the adventure of new life. ||77.4||
Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,
The soul’s experiment of joy and grief… . ||77.6||
Into creation’s centre he had come. ||77.7||
The spirit wandering from state to state
Finds here the silence of its starting-point
In the formless force and the still fixity
And brooding passion of the world of Soul. ||77.8||
All that is made and once again unmade,
The calm persistent vision of the One
Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:
Forces and lives and beings and ideas
Are taken into the stillness for a while;
There they remould their purpose and their drift,
Recast their nature and re-form their shape. ||77.9||
Ever they change and changing ever grow,
And passing through a fruitful stage of death
And after long reconstituting sleep
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
Until their work in cosmic Time is done. ||77.10||
Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds. ||77.11||
An interval was left twixt act and act,
Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,
A pause that gave new strength to do and be. ||77.12||
Beyond were regions of delight and peace,
Mute birth-places of light and hope and love,
And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose. ||77.13||
In Book Two Canto Five, The Godheads of Little Life, there is this phrase: “a stade through which we pass”. It is a discussion pertaining to beings who live in the “house of Ignorance” only. But this is just a stage through which life passes, a stade on road from Matter to eternal Self. After all, existence is not an accident in Time; it is not a paradox of a creative Thought, Matter being read by Mind, “Inconscience monstrously engendering soul”.
His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance;
His force nears not even once the Omnipotent,
Rare are his visits of heavenly ecstasy. ||46.19||
The bliss which sleeps in things and tries to wake,
Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:
This scanty grace is his persistent stay;
It lightens the burden of his many ills
And reconciles him to his little world. ||46.20||
He is satisfied with his common average kind;
Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought,
His old familiar interests and desires
He has made a thick and narrowing hedge
Defending his small life from the Invisible;
His being’s kinship to infinity
He has shut away from him into inmost self,
Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God. ||46.21||
His being was formed to play a trivial part
In a little drama on a petty stage;
In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life
Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast. ||46.22||
He is the crown of all that has been done:
Thus is creation’s labour justified;
This is the world’s result, Nature’s last poise! ||46.23||
And if this were all and nothing more were meant,
If what now seems were the whole of what must be,
If this were not a stade through which we pass
On our road from Matter to eternal Self,
To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things,
Well might interpret our mind’s limited view
Existence as an accident in Time,
Illusion or phenomenon or freak,
The paradox of a creative Thought
Which moves between unreal opposites,
Inanimate Force struggling to feel and know,
Matter that chanced to read itself by Mind,
Inconscience monstrously engendering soul. ||46.24||
To some interned subjective sight it might be just minute dotting of little self as world-being’s conscious base. But there is the sign of Matter’s infinite. This only a provisional scheme,
There is a deeper seeing from within
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the luminous wideness of the Spirit’s gaze. ||47.3||
After passing through this stade, there is an Influence from a Light above:
All is not here a blinded Nature’s task:
A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,
A Witness sanctioning her will and works,
An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;
There is an Influence from a Light above,
There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;
A mystic motive drives the stars and suns. ||47.9||
All is| not here| a blind|+ed Na|+ture’s task:|
A Word,| a Wis|+dom watch|+es us| from on high,|
A Wit|+ness sanc|+tion+ing| her will| and works,|
An Eye| un+seen| in th un+see|+ing vast;|
There is| an In|+flu+ence| from a Light| a+bove,|
There are thoughts| re+mote| and sealed| e+ter|+ni+ties;|
A mys|+tic mo|+tive drives| the stars| and suns.| 47.9
The last is an impeccable iambic line, perfect with five rushing feet, the beat in the paces of calm assured celestial wonders, of iambs. What drives the stars and suns is a mystic motive and not as yet Dante’s love, the love as an urging force to set the sun and the other stars on move in the vastness of possibilities of the creation’s greatness, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
In the case of little life knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance and hence, necessarily, the mystic motive will have to pass through intermediate stages, stadia, covering stadium after slow and even hazardous stadium. This will not be so when all-knowing love becomes the driving power for objects in their movement.
There is a little history apropos of the composition of the “death-and-birth” sentence, that is:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live. ||127.30||
This is the final printed text. But the composition started with chitpad noting and revisions on the typed copies. These are as follows:
Chit-pads:
In the slow process of the evolving Spirit,
The work divine has been achieved at last:
A camp of God if pitched in human time.
In the slow process of the evolving spirit
A part achievement of the divine work
This […]
This first perfection bears the Eternal’s stamp, }deleted
His safety’s pledge and conquest’s guarantee }deleted
In the slow process of the evolving spirit
This part achievement of the divine work,
This first perfection bears the Eternal’s stamp
A bright security[?] for greater things
Intuition’s pledge and conquest’s guarantee
A camp of God is pitched in human time.
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the small span between a birth and death,
A first perfection’s stage was reached at last,
A temple was shaped where the [the] high gods could live
Out of the stone and wood of our nature’s stuff
Typed:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
Vis-à-vis the second line this is most interesting, the last two versions are:
Chitpad:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the small span between a birth and death,
A first perfection’s stage was reached at last,
A temple was shaped where the [the] high gods could live
Out of the stone and wood of our nature’s stuff
Typed:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
In Sri Aurobindo’s own hand it is “a birth and death”. Typescript has in it “a death and birth”. Also, “small span” has become “brief stade”.
Obviously these are not typos. Perhaps some intermediate drafts are missing. Or possibly revisions were made on the earlier typed draft, these in the hand of the scribe Nirodbaran. It will be wonderful, in fact most desirable, if we can have those details, the ones which could be in hand following dictations. Note also the sequence of the last two lines. Certainly all this cannot be called typos, the stamp of dictated revisions is readably distinct. From an occult point of view there is a whole world of difference between “between a birth and death” and “between a death and birth”, a purposeful detail following the journey of the soul after leaving the present body. We go by the Yogi-Poet’s dictated version than what he himself had earlier scribbled:
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
The featured image is a painting by Huta, Book Seven Canto Six
The Winds of Wonder 
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