{"id":1867,"date":"2013-07-13T01:37:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1867"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:37:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:37:59","slug":"39-agni-the-divine-will-force-vol-15-the-secret-of-veda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/15-the-secret-of-veda\/39-agni-the-divine-will-force-vol-15-the-secret-of-veda","title":{"rendered":"-39_Agni, the Divine Will-Force.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n
\nHymns to Agni<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nAgni, the Divine Will-Force <\/font><\/b>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE NAME<\/b> of this flaming godhead, Agni, derives from a root whose quality of significance is a
\npre-eminent force
\nor intensity whether in state, action, sensation or movement; but the qualities of this essential significance vary. It
\nmeans a burning brightness, whence its use for fire; it means movement and especially a curving or serpentine movement; it
\nmeans strength and force, beauty and splendour, leading and pre-eminence; it developed also certain emotional values which
\nhave perished in Sanskrit, but remain in Greek, angry passion on one side, on the other delight and love.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Vedic deity Agni is the first of the Powers, the pristine and
\npre-eminent, that have issued from the vast and secret
\nGodhead. By conscious force of the Godhead the worlds have been created and are governed from within by that hidden and
\ninner Control; Agni is the form, the fire, the forceful heat and flaming will of this Divinity. As a flaming Force of knowledge
\nhe descends to build up the worlds and seated within them, a secret deity, initiates movement and action. This divine Conscious Force contains all the other godheads in itself as the nave of a wheel contains its spokes. All puissance of action, strength
\nin the being, beauty of form, splendour of light and knowledge, glory and greatness are the manifestation of Agni. And when
\nhe is entirely delivered and fulfilled out of the envelope of the world’s crookednesses, this deity of flame and force is revealed
\nas the solar godhead of love and harmony and light, Mitra, who leads men towards the Truth.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut in the Vedic cosmos Agni appears first as a front of divine Force compact of burning heat and light which forms, assails,
\nenters into, envelops, devours, rebuilds all things in Matter. He is no random fire; his is a flame of force instinct with the light of
\ndivine knowledge. Agni is the seer-will in the universe unerring   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 387<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nin all its works. Whatever he does in his passion and power is guided by the light of the silent Truth within him. He is a truth
\nconscious soul, a seer, a priest and a worker, —the immortal worker in man. His mission is to purify all that he works upon
\nand to raise up the soul struggling in Nature from obscurity to the light, from the strife and the suffering to love and joy, from
\nthe heat and the labour to the peace and the bliss. He is, then, the Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Deva; secret inhabitant
\nof Matter and its forms, visible and beloved guest of man, it is he that guards the law of the Truth of things in the apparent
\naberrations and confusions of the world. The other gods awake with the Dawn, but Agni wakes also in the Night; he keeps his
\ndivine vision even in the darkness where there is neither moon nor star; the flame of the divine will and knowledge is visible
\neven in the densest obscurity of inconscient or half-conscient things. The infallible worker is there even when we see nowhere
\nthe conscious light of the guiding mind.
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nNo sacrifice is possible without Agni. He is at once the flame
\non the altar and the priest of the oblation. When man, awakened from his night, wills to offer his inner and outer activities to
\nthe gods of a truer and higher existence and so to arise out of mortality into the far-off immortality, his goal and his desire,
\nit is this flame of upward aspiring Force and Will that he must kindle; into this fire he must cast the sacrifice. For it is this that
\noffers to the gods and brings down in return all spiritual riches, —the divine waters, the light, the strength, the rain of heaven.
\nThis calls, this carries the gods to the house of the sacrifice. Agni is the priest man puts in front as his spiritual representative
\n(purohita<\/i>), a Will, a Force greater, higher, more infallible than his own doing for him the works of the sacrifice, purifying the
\nmaterials of the oblation, offering them to the gods whom it has summoned to the divine ritual, determining the right order
\nand season of its works, conducting the progress, the march of the sacrificial development. These and other various functions
\nof the symbolic priesthood, represented in the outward sacrifice by different officiating priests, are discharged by the single Agni.
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nAgni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 388<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and
\npurpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil
\ngods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame is a light which,
\nwhen it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming
\nupward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and
\nenters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation
\nof the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

It is true that here the light is concealed. Agni, like other gods, figures here as a child of the universal parents, Heaven
\nand Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and material Nature. This earth holds him concealed in her own materiality and does not release
\nhim for the conscious works of the Father. She hides him in all her growths, her plants, herbs, trees
\n\t\t\t—the forms full of her
\nheats, the objects that keep for the soul its delights. But at last she shall yield him up; she is the lower tinder, the mental being
\nis the upper tinder; by the pressure of the upper on the lower the flame of Agni shall be born. But it is by pressure, by a sort of
\nchurning that he is born. Therefore he is called the Son of Force.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

Even when Agni emerges, he is outwardly obscure in his
\nworkings. He becomes, first, not a pure Will, though really he is always pure, but a vital Will, the desire of the Life in us, a
\nsmoke-obscured flame, son of our crookednesses, a Beast grazing in its pasture, a force of devouring desire that feeds upon earth’s
\ngrowths, tears and ravages all upon which it feeds and leaves a black and charred line to mark its path where there was the joy
\nand glory of earth’s woodlands. But in all this there is a work of purification, which becomes conscious for the man of sacrifice.
\nAgni destroys and purifies. His very hunger and desire, infinite in its scope, prepares the establishment of a higher universal order.
\nThe smoke of his passion is overcome and this vital Will, this burning desire in the Life becomes the Steed that carries us up
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 389<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nto the highest levels, —the white Steed that gallops in the front of the Dawns.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nDelivered from his smoke-enveloped activity he burns high in our skies, scales the ether of the pure mind and mounts upon
\nthe back of heaven. There on that rarer level its god Trita Aptya takes this high-flaming force and forges it into a weapon of
\nsharpness that shall destroy all evil and ignorance. This Seer-Will becomes the guardian of the illuminations of knowledge
\n\t\t\t—
\nherds of the Sun that graze in the pastures of life secure from the Sons of division and darkness, protected by the warrior force of
\nthe Will that knows. He attains the immortality and maintains unhurt its law of truth and joy in the human creature. In the end
\nwe overpass all crookednesses of falsehood and error, emerge from the low and broken and devious ground to the straight
\npath and the high and open levels. Will and Knowledge become one; every impulse of the perfected soul becomes conscious of
\nthe essential truth of its own self-being, every act fulfils it consciently, joyously, victoriously. Such is the godhead to which the
\nVedic Fire exalts the Aryan who does the sacrifice. The Immortal conquers in the mortal and by his sacrifice. Man, the thinker,
\nfighter, toiler, becomes a seer, self-ruler and king over Nature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Veda speaks of this divine Flame in a series of splendid
\nand opulent images. He is the rapturous priest of the sacrifice, the God-Will intoxicated with its own delight, the young sage,
\nthe sleepless envoy, the ever-wakeful flame in the house, the master of our gated dwelling-place, the beloved guest, the lord
\nin the creature, the seer of the flaming tresses, the divine child, the pure and virgin God, the invincible warrior, the leader on the
\npath who marches in front of the human peoples, the immortal in mortals, the worker established in man by the gods, the unobstructed in knowledge, the infinite in being, the vast and flaming sun of the Truth, the sustainer of the sacrifice and discerner of its
\nsteps, the divine perception, the light, the vision, the firm foundation. Throughout the Veda it is in the hymns which celebrate
\nthis strong and brilliant deity that we find those which are the most splendid in poetic colouring, profound in psychological
\nsuggestion and sublime in their mystic intoxication. It is as if his  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 390<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nown flame and cry and light had seized with a burning ecstasy on the imagination of his poets.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n Amid this crowd of poetical images there are some of a symbolic character which describe the many births of the divine
\nFlame. They are recounted with an extraordinary variety. Sometimes he is the child of Heaven, the Father
\n\t\t\t—Mind or Soul —and of Earth the Mother —Body or material Nature; sometimes he is the flame born from these two tinders; sometimes
\nHeaven and Earth are called his two mothers, when the figure is more explicitly symbolic of the pure mental and psychical
\nand the physical consciousness. He is also hymned as the child of the seven Mothers
\n\t\t\t—for his complete birth is a result of the
\nmanifestation of seven principles which constitute our conscious existence —three spiritual of the infinite, three temporal of the
\nfinite, and one intermediate —and which are, respectively, the foundation of the seven worlds. Like other gods, he is said to
\nbe born of the Truth; the Truth is at once his birthplace and his home. Sometimes it is said that the Seven Beloved brought
\nhim into birth for the Lord; and here the symbol seems to carry back his source to that other principle of pure Bliss which is the
\noriginal cause of creation. He has one form of the solar light and flame, another heavenly in the mind, a third which dwells in the
\nrivers. Night and Dawn are delivered of him, the Knowledge and the Ignorance suckle alternately the divine Child in their successive occupation of our heavens. And yet again it is Matarishwan, Master of Life, who has planted him for the gods secret in the
\ngrowths of earth, secret in her creatures, man, animal and plant, secret in the mighty Waters. These Waters are the seven rivers of
\nthe luminous world that descend from heaven when Indra, the God-Mind, has slain the enveloping Python; they descend full of
\nthe light and the heavenly abundance, instinct with the clarity and the sweetness, the sweet milk and the butter and the honey.
\nAgni’s birth here from these fostering Cows, these Mothers of Plenty, is the greatest of his terrestrial births; fostered by them as
\nthe swift Mares of Life he grows at once to his divine greatness, fills all the planes with his vast and shining limbs and forms their
\nkingdoms in the soul of man into the image of a divine Truth.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 391<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe variety and flexible use of these images —they are sometimes employed in a rapid succession in the same hymn
\n\t\t\t—
\nbelongs to a period of conscious symbolism in which the image has not hardened and crystallised into the myth but is constantly
\na figure and a parable whose sense still lives and is still plastic in the originating imagination.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe actual legends about Agni, the developed parables as distinct from the less elaborate figure, are rare or non-existent
\n\t\t\t—
\nin remarkable contrast with the wealth of myth which crowds about the names of Indra and the Ashwins. He participates in the
\nlegendary actions of Indra, the Python-slaying, the recovery of the herds, the slaying of the Dasyus; his own activity is universal
\nbut in spite of his supreme greatness or perhaps because of it he seeks no separate end and claims no primacy over the other
\ngods. He is content to be a worker for man and the helpful deities. He is the doer of the great Aryan work and the pure
\nand sublime mediator between earth and heaven. Disinterested, sleepless, invincible this divine Will-force works in the world as a
\nuniversal Soul of power housed in all beings, Agni Vaishwanara, the greatest, most powerful, most brilliant and most impersonal
\nof all the cosmic Deities.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe name, Agni, is translated here Power, Strength, Will,
\nthe God-will, or the Flame according to the context. The names of the Rishis are also given, wherever necessary, their significant
\nvalue, as in the first hymn Gavisthira which means the Steadfast in the Light or the general name Atri. Atri means either the
\nEater or the Traveller; Agni himself is the Atri as he is also the Angiras; out of a devouring desire, experience and enjoyment of
\nthe forms of the world he advances to the liberated truth and delight of the soul in the possession of its infinite existence.
\n  
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 392<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hymns to Agni   Agni, the Divine Will-Force   THE NAME of this flaming godhead, Agni, derives from a root whose quality of significance is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15-the-secret-of-veda","wpcat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}