The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Human Fathers 193
children, slayers of darkness, Vishwamitra proceeds to speak of
the ancient Fathers who first formed it and of the great victory
by which they discovered “that Truth, the sun lying in the darkness”.
“None is there among mortals who can blame (or, as it
rather seems to me to mean, no power of mortality that can confine
or bind) our ancient fathers, they who were fighters for the
cows; Indra of the mightiness, Indra of the achievement released
upward for them the fortified pens, — there where, a comrade
with his comrades, the fighters, the Navagwas, following on
his knees the cows, Indra with the ten Dashagwas found that
Truth, satya ˙m tad, even the sun dwelling in the darkness.” This
is the usual image of the conquest of the luminous cattle and the
discovery of the hidden Sun; but in the next verse it is associated
with two other related images which also occur frequently in the
Vedic hymns, the pasture or field of the cow and the honey found
in the cow. “Indra found the honey stored in the Shining One,
the footed and hoofed (wealth) in the pasture 4 of the Cow.” The
Shining One, usriyā (also usrā), is another word which like go
means both ray and cow and is used as a synonym of go in the
Veda. We hear constantly of the ghr.ta or clarified butter stored in
the cow, hidden there by the Panis in three portions according to
Vamadeva; but it is sometimes the honeyed ghr.ta and sometimes
simply the honey, madhumad ghr.tam and madhu. We have seen
how closely the yield of the cow, the ghr.ta, and the yield of
the Soma plant are connected in other hymns and now that we
know definitely what is meant by the Cow, this strange and incongruous
connection becomes clear and simple enough. Ghr.ta
also means shining, it is the shining yield of the shining cow;
it is the formed light of conscious knowledge in the mentality
which is stored in the illumined consciousness and it is liberated
by the liberation of the Cow: Soma is the delight, beatitude,
Ananda inseparable from the illumined state of the being; and
as there are, according to the Veda, three planes of mentality
in us, so there are three portions of the ghr.ta dependent on the
4
Name goh. . Nama from nam to move, range, Greek nemō; nama is the range, pasture,
Greek nomos.