Hymns to the Mystic Fire

[10]

RV I.1.1

1) I adore Agni the god, the Purohit of the sacrifice, the Ritwik, the Hota, most delight-placing.

I seek with adoration the God-Will, divine priest of the sacrifice placed in front, sacrificer in the seasons, offerer of the oblation, who most ordains the ecstasy.

Agni (अग् and अज्) is the brilliant, the strong, the preeminent, he who moves, leads, drives, acts. He is the Flame, at once Heat and Light, Force and self-possessing Consciousness in the Force, Will with perfect revealing and intuitive knowledge in the will and its acts,—the Seer-Will of the one & infinite Divine Conscious-Existence at work in the universe.

The Rishi, seeker and finder of knowledge, adores and seeks this divine Seer-Will as the priest of the inner sacrifice by

Page 550

which man seeks the godhead. He is the priest in the three chief functions of that divine priesthood. The divine Seer-Will is the Purohit, that power which is placed in front of our consciousness to act for the human being; replacing the fallible human will this divine force as soon as it is kindled conducts the sacrifice; he leads it in its journey through the stages by which the sacrificer rises to the supramental divine consciousness; he is its vanguard and front-fighter in the battle of the divine with the undivine and the march of man to his goal, पुरएता, प्रणेता. The Seer-Will is the Ritwik, he sacrifices in the order, the right seasons, the right periods, the twelve months, the hundred years of the sacrificial session: he knows the time, place, order by which the Swadha, the self-arranging self-movement of the divine Nature in man that is developing itself, progresses till it turns itself into the Swaha, the luminous self-force of the fulfilled divine Nature of the gods. This order of the sacrificial seasons is called ऋतु and represents the progressive movement of development of the hidden truth of things in man. The Seer-Will is also the Hota, the power that brings the divine powers into the physical consciousness of man by his flaming force in the revealedWord, manifests & forms them there and offers to them the whole activity of the being as a sacrifice of the lower human to the higher divine. The result of this progressive action is the divine delight or ecstasy, the Ananda of the infinite & divine Consciousness, brought into man, there established, held, expanding till it possesses the whole being and occupies all the energies. The Seer-Will is the godhead in us which is most powerful thus to establish, hold, order the action of the Delight in us. This delight is represented as the wealth of the divine existence, by the words रयिः, राधः, राः, रत्न, each of which has a different connotation. रयिः is simply the accumulation of the riches, the mass of the felicity; राधः its riches as affecting the mental, emotional heart-consciousness, its vital and sensible abundance; राः is the bliss, the higher joy of these riches, more than mental in its touch on man; रत्न is its pure ecstasy of the Ananda. This last aspect, as it is the culmination of the Vedic वेदस्, the finding, conscious possession of the Divine, is rightly put here in front in the first

Page 551

rik of the Veda. The Seer-Will is the first means, the Ananda of the divine riches the ultimate aim and last achievement of the Vedic Yoga.