The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Doctrine of the Mystics
THE VEDA possesses the high spiritual substance of the
Upanishads, but lacks their phraseology; it is an inspired
knowledge as yet insufficiently equipped with intellectual
and philosophical terms. We find a language of poets and
illuminates to whom all experience is real, vivid, sensible, even
concrete, not yet of thinkers and systematisers to whom the
realities of the mind and soul have become abstractions. Yet a
system, a doctrine there is; but its structure is supple, its terms
are concrete, the cast of its thought is practical and experimental,
but in the accomplished type of an old and sure experience, not
of one that is crude and uncertain because yet in the making.
Here we have the ancient psychological science and the art of
spiritual living of which the Upanishads are the philosophical
outcome and modification and Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga
the late intellectual result and logical dogma. But like all life,
like all science that is still vital, it is free from the armoured
rigidities of the reasoning intellect; in spite of its established
symbols and sacred formulae it is still large, free, flexible, fluid,
supple and subtle. It has the movement of life and the large
breath of the soul. And while the later philosophies are books
of Knowledge and make liberation the one supreme good, the
Veda is a Book of Works and the hope for which it spurns
our present bonds and littleness is perfection, self-achievement,
immortality.
The doctrine of the Mystics recognises an Unknowable,
Timeless and Unnameable behind and above all things and not
seizable by the studious pursuit of the mind. Impersonally, it
is That, the One Existence; to the pursuit of our personality it
reveals itself out of the secrecy of things as the God or Deva, —
nameless though he has many names, immeasurable and beyond
description, though he holds in himself all description of name