The Secret of the Veda

A Hymn of the Thought-Gods

The shining host has arisen in my soul, the host of the Thought-gods and, they sing a hymn as they march upward, a hymn of the heart's illumination. March thou on, O my soul, impetuously to their violent and mighty music. For they are drunken with the joy of an inspiration that betrays not to falsehood, because the truth of eternal Nature is its guide. They are the comrades of a firm and blazing Light and in the force of the Light they work out their lofty aggressions; conquerors, violently they march on their path, self-protecting they guard of themselves the soul against falsehood; for they are many and march without a gap in their brilliant ranks. Violent are they as a herd of rushing bulls; the nights come against them, but they overleap the nights; they possess the earth in our thoughts and they rise with them to the heavens. No half-lights, no impotent things are they, but mighty in aggression and puissant to attain. Spears of light they hold and they loose them from their hands at the children of Darkness; the flashing lightnings of the Thought-gods search the night and the light of heaven rises of itself on our souls at their battle-call. Truth is their shining strength; the hosts of the Thought-gods are the artificers of the soul and they fashion its immortality; themselves they yoke their coursers to the chariot of our life and they drive galloping to the joy that is its goal.

They have bathed their limbs in the waters of Parushni, in the stream that has a multitude of currents, they have put on their divine raiment and now with the wheels of their chariots they break open all Nature's secret caves. Sometimes they march on a thousand branching paths, sometimes they rush direct at their goal; sometimes their paths are within, sometimes they follow outward Nature's thousand ways; the world-sacrifice fulfils itself by the many names of their godhead and by their ever-widening

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march. Now they make themselves as galloping forces of our life, now they are gods and powers of the soul; at last they put on forms of a supreme world, forms of vision, forms of light. They have attained to the goal, they support the rhythms of the world, chanting they weave their glorious dance round the very fountain of things; they are creators of supreme forms, they expand the soul in vision and make it a divine blaze of light. For these are rushing seekers of the Truth; for the Truth their lightnings stab and search; they are seers, they are creators and ordainers; their aggressions are inspired by the might and force of heaven, therefore affirmed in our thoughts they speed carrying us confidently on their way. When the mind is full of them, it is borne on towards godhead, for they have the radiant inspiration of the path.

Who has known the place of their birth or who has sat in their high beatitudes? Who desires and seeks his Friend beyond? A Mother bore them many-hued in her soul and of her they tell him; a Violent One was their Father whose impulse drives all beings that are born, and him they reveal. Seven and seven the Thought-gods came to me and seven times they gave a hundred-fold; in Yamuna I will bathe the shining herds of my thoughts which they have given, I will purify my swiftnesses in the river of my soul.

Lo, they march on in their cohorts and their companies; let us follow in their steps with the pace of our thinkings. For they bear with them an imperishable seed of creation and the grain of immortal forms and this if they plant in the fields of the soul, there shall grow as its harvest life universal and bliss transcendent. They will put by all that derides our aspiration and pass beyond all that limits us; they will destroy all fault and dumbness and the soul's poverties. For theirs is the rain of the abundance of heaven and theirs the storms that set flowing the rivers of life; their thunders are the chant of the hymn of the gods and the proclamations of the Truth. They are the eye that leads us on a happy path and he who follows them shall not stumble, nor have pain nor hurt, nor decay nor die; their plenitudes are not destroyed nor their felicities diminished; they make of man

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a seer and a king. Their vastness is the blazing of a divine Sun; they shall place us in the seats of Immortality.

Of all that was of old and of all that is new, of all that rises from the soul and all that seeks expression they are the impellers. They stand in the upper and the lower and the middle heaven; they have descended from the highest supreme. They are born of the Truth; they are luminous leaders of the mind; they shall drink the sweet wine of delight and give us the supreme inspirations. The Woman, the Divine is with them who shall put away from us hurt and thirst and desire and refashion man's mind in the form of the godhead. Lo, these are knowers of the Truth, seers whom the Truth inspires, vast in expression, vast in diffusion, young for ever and immortal.

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