The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Agni, the Divine Will-Force 389
journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and
purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is
the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil
gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by
the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame is a light which,
when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher
and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming
upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the
vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and
enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above
where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation
of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial
sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.
It is true that here the light is concealed. Agni, like other
gods, figures here as a child of the universal parents, Heaven
and Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and material Nature. This earth
holds him concealed in her own materiality and does not release
him for the conscious works of the Father. She hides him in
all her growths, her plants, herbs, trees — the forms full of her
heats, the objects that keep for the soul its delights. But at last
she shall yield him up; she is the lower tinder, the mental being
is the upper tinder; by the pressure of the upper on the lower the
flame of Agni shall be born. But it is by pressure, by a sort of
churning that he is born. Therefore he is called the Son of Force.
Even when Agni emerges, he is outwardly obscure in his
workings. He becomes, first, not a pure Will, though really he
is always pure, but a vital Will, the desire of the Life in us, a
smoke-obscured flame, son of our crookednesses, a Beast grazing
in its pasture, a force of devouring desire that feeds upon earth’s
growths, tears and ravages all upon which it feeds and leaves a
black and charred line to mark its path where there was the joy
and glory of earth’s woodlands. But in all this there is a work of
purification, which becomes conscious for the man of sacrifice.
Agni destroys and purifies. His very hunger and desire, infinite in
its scope, prepares the establishment of a higher universal order.
The smoke of his passion is overcome and this vital Will, this
burning desire in the Life becomes the Steed that carries us up