The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

150 The Secret of the Veda
its circumstances and its helping gods, of the conquest of Swar,
the supreme world of Light. So much results beyond doubt,
it seems to me, from the language of the Veda itself; but also
that language points to this Sun being a symbol of the divine
illumining Power, Swar the world of the divine Truth and the
conquest of divine Truth the real aim of the Vedic Rishis and the
subject of their hymns. I will now examine as rapidly as possible
the evidence which points towards this conclusion.
First of all, we see that Swar and Surya are different conceptions
in the minds of the Vedic Rishis, but always closely
connected. We have for instance the verse in Bharadwaja’s hymn
to Soma and Indra, VI.72.1, “Ye found the Sun, ye found Swar,
ye slew all darkness and limitations” and in a hymn of Vamadeva
to Indra, IV.16, which celebrates this achievement of Indra and
the Angirases, “When by the hymns of illumination (arkaih. )
Swar was found, entirely visible, when they (the Angirases) made
to shine the great light out of the night, he (Indra) made the
darknesses ill-assured (i.e. loosened their firm hold) so that men
might have vision.” In the first passage we see that Swar and
Surya are different from each other and that Swar is not merely
another name for Surya; but at the same time the finding of Swar
and the finding of Surya are represented as closely connected and
indeed one movement and the result is the slaying of all darkness
and limitations. So in the second passage the finding and making
visible of Swar is associated with the shining of a great light out
of the darkness, which we find from parallel passages to be the
recovery, by the Angirases, of the Sun that was lying concealed
in the darkness. Surya is found by the Angirases through the
power of their hymns or true mantras; Swar also is found and
made visible by the hymns of the Angirases, arkaih. .Itisclear
therefore that the substance of Swar is a great light and that that
light is the light of Surya the Sun.
We might even suppose that Swar is a word for the sun, light
or the sky if it were not clear from other passages that it is the
name of a world. It is frequently alluded to as a world beyond
the Rodasi, beyond heaven and earth, and is otherwise called the
wide world, uru loka, or the wide other world, uru u loka, or