The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Conquest over the Dasyus 233
of the darkness concealed in darkness, the deep and abysmal
flood that covered all things, the inconscient ocean, apraketa ˙m
salilam (X.129.3); in that non-existence the seers have found by
desire in the heart and thought in the mind that which builds
up the true existence. This non-existence of the truth of things,
asat, is the first aspect of them that emerges from the inconscient
ocean; and its great darkness is the Vedic Night, rātrī ˙m jagato
nive´sanīm (I.35.1), which holds the world and all its unrevealed
potentialities in her obscure bosom. Night extends her realm
over this triple world of ours and out of her in heaven, in the
mental being, Dawn is born who delivers the Sun out of the
darkness where it was lying concealed and eclipsed and creates
the vision of the supreme Day in the non-existence, in the Night,
asati ketum. It is therefore in these three realms that the battle
between the Lords of Light and the Lords of the Ignorance
proceeds through its continual vicissitudes.
The word pan. i means dealer, trafficker, from pan. (also pan, 1
cf. Tamil pan. , Greek ponos, labour) and we may perhaps regard
the Panis as the powers that preside over those ordinary unillumined
sense-activities of life whose immediate root is in the
dark subconscient physical being and not in the divine mind. The
whole struggle of man is to replace this action by the luminous
working of mind and life which comes from above through the
mental existence. Whoever thus aspires, labours, battles, travels,
ascends the hill of being is the Aryan (ārya, arya, ari with the
various senses, to toil, to fight, to climb or rise, to travel, to
prepare the sacrifice); for the work of the Aryan is a sacrifice
which is at once a battle and an ascent and a journey, a battle
against the powers of darkness, an ascent to the highest peaks
of the mountain beyond earth and heaven into Swar, a journey
to the other shore of the rivers and the ocean into the farthest
Infinity of things. The Aryan has the will to the work, he is the
doer of the work (kāru, kīri, etc.), the gods who put their force
1
Sayana takes pan in Veda — to praise, but in one place he admits the sense of
vyavahāra, dealing. Action seems to me to be its sense in most passages. From pan.
in the sense of action we have the earlier names of the organs of action, pān. i, hand, foot
or hoof, Lat. penis, cf.alsopāyu.