Vedas
(Mother:) “I go on reading the Vedas and I see quite well how beautiful it is and how effective it must have been for those people, what a power for realization these hymns must have had! But for me....
Yet for a time I was in contact with all these gods and all these things, and they had an entirely concrete reality for me; but now ... I read and I understand, but I cannot live it. And I don't know why. It still hasn't triggered the experience. You see, experience for me — the constant, total and permanent Experience — is ... that there is nothing other than the Supreme — only the Supreme — that the Supreme alone exists. So when they speak of Agni or Varuna or Indra ... it doesn't strike a chord. However, what the Vedas succeed in doing very well is to give you the perception of your infirmity and ineptitude, of the dismal state we are in now; it succeeds wonderfully in doing that!”[1]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “The hypothesis I propose is that the Rig Veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries were the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the Gods. This wisdom was, they thought, unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind or in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits. Hence they favoured the existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers. The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructed on this principle.”[2]
(Mother:) “The Vedas, after all, were written by people who remembered a radical experience, which must have taken place on earth at a given moment, as an example of what was to come.”[3]
- (Satyendra:) “It is said that the Tantras are as old as the Vedas.
(Sri Aurobindo:) The principle of Tantra may be as old as the Vedas, but the known Tantras are a later development.
- (Purani:) The Vedas are regarded as the highest authority in India. So everything wants to peg itself on to the Vedas.
Why is there this passion for antiquity? Truth is Truth whenever it may be found.
- (Satyendra:) The Vedas are considered eternal.
Because the source of their inspiration is eternal.
- (Satyendra:) Somebody has said that the eternal Veda is in everybody's heart.
- ↑ Mother's Agenda, 18 April 1961
- ↑ The Secret of the Veda, p.7, “The Problem and Its Solution”
- ↑ Mother's Agenda 1961, April 7
- ↑ Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p.163, 17 January 1939
- ↑ “The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being.” (The Synthesis of Yoga, p.53, “The Four Aids”)
See also