Essays on the Rig Veda and its mystic symbolism, with translations of selected hymns.
On Veda
Essays on the Rig Veda and its mystic symbolism, with translations of selected hymns. These writings on and translations of the Rig Veda were published in the monthly review Arya between 1914 and 1920. Most of them appeared there under three headings: The Secret of the Veda, 'Selected Hymns' and 'Hymns of the Atris'. Other translations that did not appear under any of these headings make up the final part of the volume.
THEME/S
The result of the procession of the shining dawns, of the divine returns of Surya, of the increasings of Pushan and his leading on the Path is summed up in the creation of Savitri the luminous Creator. It is the god Savitri who sets us there where the ancient doers of the Work have preceded us; that is the desirable flame and splendour of the divine Creator on which the seer has to meditate and towards which this god impels our thoughts, that
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the bliss of the creative godhead on the forms of which our soul must meditate as it journeys towards it. It is the supreme creation in which the goddess undivided and infinite speaks out her Word and the all-ruling kings Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman; to that consummation the power of all these godheads turns with a united acceptance.
That divine word is the word of the Truth; for a superconscient Truth lies concealed and is the basis of the infinite being which stands revealed on those higher altitudes of our ascension. What we now accept as life is the evil dream, the death that governs us because we live in a false knowledge, a limited and divided existence exposed to every devourer. That is not real life. For life we have to be able to look long upon the Sun; for life we have to be able to hold in our thought a knowledge and a word full of the consummate perception; we have to bring forward the Truth as an offering so that the luminous god with his golden hands full of the Light may rise high in our heavens and hear our word. We must choose and take into ourselves that supreme and vast state of this Mighty One who has the thought of the knowledge, he who creates for the gods the immortality and the highest enjoyment; we must widen out the cord of Savitri so that it shall release us into higher states of life made accessible to men and harmonised with their being. To hold that felicity we have to become free from sin and evil in the wideness and purity of Varuna, in the all-embracing harmony of Mitra, in the supreme creation of Savitri.
Then Savitri shall loose away from us, shall uncreate the suffering of the evil dream. For the seeker of the straightness he shall create an increasing wideness of his existence so that even with our incomplete knowledge we shall grow in our being towards the gods. By the godheads he will foster our knowledge and lead us towards the universal formation of them in the undivided consciousness of the infinite Aditi which we have chosen as our goal. All that we have done in our ignorance, in our divided and oppressed discernment of things, in our mere mortal becoming and humanity, against gods or men, he shall uncreate and make us free from the sin. For he is the creator of the Right, he is the creator who creates the Truth.
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That Truth he shall create in a great wideness and force of our physical being, in a rich abundance of our mental and by its undiminishable vastness he shall uphold all the worlds of our existence. Thus in the working of Savitri whose creation is the Truth and of Mitra and Varuna the gods shall uphold in us its substance of varied light, the felicity of its energies and illuminations till all existence is that godhead of Savitri behind us and before, below as well as above, till we possess the far-extended life and have built up the universal form of our being,—the universal form which he creates for us when with hands of golden light, with the tongue that tastes the wine of sweetness he moves in the triple knowledge of the highest heaven of Truth, attains in the gods to the divine rhythm which he creates for his accomplished Law and takes up his abode in that golden strength of his, the Seer robed in light who first stretched out his two arms of knowledge and power to create the world. He who as Twashtri the Fashioner of things attended always by the male godheads and their female energies, powers of Purusha and powers of Prakriti, made and makes all things, shall as Savitri create for man the thinker born in a body that Truth and Immortality.
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