Mahasaraswati

MAHASARASWATI is the Mother’s Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker.

She is Mahasaraswati, the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit, and hers is the Yoga that is skill in works, yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam, and the utilities of divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit to life and the happiness of its harmonies.

And in all her powers and forms she carries with her the supreme sense of the masteries of the eternal Ishwari, a rapid and divine capacity for all kinds of action that may be demanded from the instrument, oneness, a participating sympathy, a free identity, with all energies in all beings and therefore a spontaneous and fruitful harmony with all the divine will in the universe. The intimate feeling of her presence and her powers and the satisfied assent of all our being to her workings in and around it is the last perfection of faith in the Shakti.

Saraswati means, “she of the stream, the flowing movement”, and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for the goddess of inspiration.

Saraswati, the inspiration, is full of her luminous plenitudes, rich in substance of thought. She upholds the Sacrifice, the offering of the mortal being’s activities to the divine by awakening his consciousness so that it assumes right states of emotion and right movements of thought in accordance with the Truth from which she pours her illuminations and by impelling in it the rise of those truths which, according to the Vedic Rishis, liberate the life and being from falsehood, weakness and limitation and open to it the doors of the supreme felicity.

Saraswati brings into active consciousness in the human being the great flood or great movement, the Truth-Consciousness itself, and illumines with it all our thoughts.

We must remember that this Truth-Consciousness of the Vedic Rishis is a supramental plane, a level of the hill of being which is beyond our ordinary reach and to which we have to climb with difficulty. It is not part of our waking being, it is hidden from us in the sleep of the superconscient. Saraswati by the constant action of the inspiration awakens the Truth to consciousness in our thoughts.

These are the three Riks devoted to Saraswati, the divine Word, who represents the stream of inspiration that descends from the Truth-Consciousness, and thus limpidly runs their sense:

“May purifying Saraswati with all the plenitude of her forms of plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacrifice. ”

“She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in consciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacrifice.”

“Saraswati by the perception awakens in consciousness the great flood (the vast movement of the ṛtam) and illumines entirely all the thoughts.