Agni — His Immanence And Ascension
Vedic Deities
Note: I have rendered the essay from the standpoint of the perceptions and spiritual practices of the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, more from self-experience and inspiration than from an academic viewpoint, for the Vedic tradition and its esoteric practices cannot be understood by a rigorous analysis of their overt ritualism and external forms, and even less so by the western Indology and its earnest subscribers.
From the viewpoint of evolutionary dynamics, from the perspective of a spiritual outflowering of the evolutionary soul, Agni represents an anterior possibility in the evolution of the human species, as he also represents the possibility of the formation of an individualised consciousness in the plant and the animal (an aggregate individuality, not a constituted one), and this possibility, if one sees from the higher supramental planes, necessitates the inevitable completion of the Psychic self-development of the individual as the very basis of a still higher and vaster possibilities of self-development of the individual as well as humanity in the grand scheme of the Divine Play. The human consciousness tends to dismiss the inner for the outer, intangible for the tangible, imperceptible for the perceptible, and therefore, true and self-transmuting knowledge for ignorance of being and twilight of lower existence. The growth of the Psychic in the individual as well a collective growth of it in the evolving humanity, the sum of the confounded individual in existence, depends on the hidden principle of the Spirit, locus of the all-Divine here in the schemata of Nature, and it is the reason why existence and everything in it is in a constant state of equilibrium without falling apart into disintegration and chaos; even death and decay do not alter the core functionality and purpose of their presence here, but only dissipate the outward existence into a loop of purposeless and aimless play, as if a skiff tossed by the formidable currents of the ocean only to reach the eddies of insignificant life-cycle. The Psychic is Agni in self-manifestation, an evolutionary divine symbol of the Supreme in manifestation, and even the Avatar can only manifest through this evolutionary marvel, and a marvel indeed it is, for it determines the birth both of the individual and the humanity and all their individual and collective circumstances and conditions. Agni is a self-effectuating light and power of the Divine, determining its own forms through which it could grow into a higher spiritual Consciousness, as it determines, in a farther development, the forms of a collective divine manifestation. But it is a higher determinism of the Spirit in evolution, in the manifestation of God, not outside, for it never goes out of manifestation into non-manifestation or into a featureless eternity beyond time and space. In the great act of self-determination of the Spirit, when it decided to manifest something of itself into its own manifestation, it carved out something of itself, all-creative Fire which would govern the higher elements in the lower and develop them to their full potential, while evolving potentially into a being of light in the lower strata, a conscious godhead self-absorbed in the joy and delight of self-existence here amid a countless negations and varying pains of lower existence, for it remains untouched by the duality of existence or by the crude processes of lower nature. A divine act of self-determination preempts a certain devising of its own apparatus in which it works flawlessly like breath in the body, for indeed the Psychic is the luminous breath of the Divine in embodied life.
There is a stratum or sphere from which flows a dominant and self-governing principle of the Divine, which propels the psychic self-development in the individual as well as in the determination and growth of collective nature of all manifest life, and it not only propels but guides the entire course of its self-development to its logical fulfilment in the Divine, and even in the stone, the fire burns until it kindles the life-principle in its hard centre. It is more than a misconception to think that the inert stone cannot manifest the life-principle which often breaks through an impossible negation or out of its exact opposite, and less of an error to assume that it can too grow into a more vibrant form of Matter one day in the great progression of Nature, for these things, if viewed from a synthetic vision of a self-aware knowledge of the Divine, would reveal to our inner senses the role played by the immortal Fire in the schemata of a Conscious Power acting in and through Nature. It is in the nature and manifestation of a self-exceeding divine Knowledge that we have to repose our faith and derive our sense of existence in order to transcended our difficult and impossible nature, and not only transcend but transform it into a puissant figure of God in Matter. God and Matter are not acrimonious to each other, neither are they irreconcilable contradictions running away from each other in the slow process of Nature’s movement towards something higher and greater than what she has worked out so far in her long evolutionary march.
The Divine, which is at the altar of the heart, the all-immanent Witness, summons the powers of the higher domains of light to the fertile ground of negation, turns it into an altar-ground of sacrifice and lights there the sacrificial fire of inviolable purity and self-exceeding puissance, as it also summons them to light the same fire within the secret altar-ground of the aspiring heart, and this summoning of the higher into the lower is a natural movement of God in evolution, and the evolving soul too follows the same curve and aspires for the higher to be established into the lower strata, the lower triplicity of being, guided predominantly by the unceremonious forces which often keep the soul of man chained to the narrow limits of a decaying mortal existence. The incarnation of Agni and his embodying of the both the general collective and individual human aggregate in evolution is a natural phenomenon, a self-affirming fact of a luminous divine determinate which seeks through the ignorant heart and the dumb external, through the countless relatives and impermanencies of untransformed life, the eternal sense and meaning of God-realisation in the very domain of a self-negating existence. Therefore, the sense and meaning of a Vedic sacrifice can only be found in the great inner expanse of the manifest, occult Spirit in the aspiring heart of the seeker, and the symbol of divine Agni appearing on the high ground of sacrifice, though coded into a secret language in unintelligible verses, is an inner vision of the godhead in his supreme spiritual element of light in the manifested existence.
Agni is also the mystic of the sacrifice, the energising personality of the higher heavens, the lord of whom or whose conscious energising the vedic sacrificial lore was born and given an immaculate structure and a pedestal for the high sacrifice, for at the altar of all things divine, he is the presiding fire of sacrifice and embodies as well as carries the truth of the sacrifice to the supreme Divine above or within, and as a mystic of the sacrifice he governs the secret principle and fruits of the sacrifice and bestows them only upon those that are fit and self-progressive and upward-inclined in their seekings. But his sole governing act in the individual, in the inner realms of the secret presence of the soul, is a vast spiritual action insisting constantly on a higher truth and its manifestation in the being, and by which it accomplishes, by a further and more forceful insistence, on the idea of an upright and stable physical in which its sacrificial fire could burn without a flicker or mixture of the lower impurities. The Vedic rituals, the sense of which we no longer possess or even faintly understand, were based on a sound, pragmatic idea of a higher Truth and Consciousness as the basis of all existence, and that truth and consciousness could be and must be found in their exact opposites, in Ignorance and Darkness, in Death and Decay. This was the fundamental drive behind their seekings and aspirations, and Vedic Rishis had built their complex and esoteric systems of recondite knowledge, the immeasurable treasure trove of divine wisdom, on a pedestal built by the inviolable purity of the immortal fire, for here we must understand a most important thing, which is also a self-affirmative spiritual fact, that no Vedic ritual is possible without Agni and no movement of knowledge inbound or outbound of the divine sacrificial fire and its ritual. It is a self-affirmative spiritual fact, because from the viewpoint of self-experience of the soul as a representative principle or determinism of the divine Spirit, it is only logical to conclude, which is infallibly so, that in the constituted lower determinism of things the representative soul assumes a certain growing dynamism and mastery of the ingress and egress of the lower movements, and therefore, such a dynamism of the soul can continue to grow and imperially assert itself in the lower only with the help and participation of Agni and propel the lower towards the higher ranges of spiritual consciousness by a right and perfect sacrifice. The immanence of Agni in the individual as well as in the collective human aggregate is a sign of its illimitable puissance and a symbol of a self-exceeding godhead in the physical.
The overt symbolism of Veda as a ritualistic tradition of a rustic, barbaric race of men was more of a derivation of the West, a crude conception hammered out of manipulated history and a self-confident ignorance and foist on us through a methodical treachery of outward machinery bent on replacing the timeless esoteric wisdom of the Veda with a crudity of Indological abracadabra and its inexorably stupid aberrations. Indeed there is an overt symbolism which is part of the esoteric tradition of the Vedic cycle and thought; is, because Veda is eternal and immortal. We may call it an overt esotericism of the Veda, and when it is seen from the spiritual and the occult, it is no longer a hidden, illegible and confusing ritualism but a vibrant and occult form of the secrets of existence and spiritual perfection of both the ascending and descending strata of an imperial movement of the Transcendent into the infinite variations of himself and all that does not seem to be himself in the finite existence, for finite is only a relative term evolving into its self-extended form in the universe, into the rapturous figure of Krishna, and here we see the sense of the Veda from the viewpoint of Gita which sermonises the possibility of the soul evolving into an infinite term and determinate of the supracosmic Absolute as well as the possibility of a nearness of it to the transcendent Divine. But the determination of these possibilities proceed, — though actually not begin here primordially in evolution, for these derive from the Supreme, — from a dynamic impulse ingrained in the evolution of consciousness, the inextinguishable eternal fire of Agni, and it is he who makes the evolving term of the individual and humanity possible in this great terrestrial movement of Krishna and Kali. And, we arrive here at a synthetic understanding of the myriad workings of the mystic fire, a rambunctious, delightful child of the Supreme Mother in the figure of an evolving soul in the individual, often described as no more than the size of a thumb, but these figure of speech do not confine or limit the infinite variations of his infallible workings in the individual as well as in the collective consciousness, do not at all reveal the spiritual heights of which he is capable and in possession; in him ascend the infinite possibilities to the Divine and in whose nature the Divine abides as the immanent Deity. The spiritual eye discovers through the overt symbolism the recondite mystery of the flaming godhead in the manner and purpose of a high ritual, and it is by discovering the godhead in oneself through self-experience that the aspirant formulates the sense of the ascending trajectory and method of a wider, synthetic knowledge of the evolutionary dynamics.
Thus formulated, the ritual for an ascending knowledge becomes more illumined and synthetic, not complete or spiritually exhaustive. A still farther journey into the nature of a divine Spirit above presupposes a completer perfection of individual nature fit enough for the ritual of a spiritual ascent and pressure of a consequent descent and the aid and wider participation of Agni as a friend of both the upward and downward journey of the aspiring soul, but we will see about this and more in the next installment.
Mahasaraswati and The Sense and History of the Vedic Symbol
Mahasaraswati and The Perfection of The Divine Sruti
Mahasaraswati And The Perfection of Consciousness
Surya And The Ascending Path Of The Spirit
