The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Guardians of the Light 505
be gracious, O puissant Lord, have grace. Whatever this be, O
Varuna, that we human beings act, a treason against the Divine
Birth, wheresoever by the Ignorance we have put away thy laws,
smite us not for that sin, O God.”
Ignorance, this matrix of sin, has in its substantial effect
the appearance of a triple cord of limited mind, inefficient life,
obscure physical animality, the three ropes with which the Rishi
Shunahshepa in the parable was bound as a victim to the sacrificial
post. The whole result is a struggling or inert poverty of
being; it is the meagreness of a mortal undelight and the insufficiency
of a being that collapses at every moment towards death.
When Varuna the Mighty comes and sunders this threefold restraint,
we are freed towards riches and immortality. Uplifted,
the real man arises to his true kingship in the undivided being.
The upper cord flies upward releasing the wings of the Soul into
superconscient heights; the middle cord parts both ways and all
ways, the constrained life breaking out into a happy breadth
of existence; the lower cord collapses downward taking with it
the alloy of our physical being to disappear and be dissolved in
the stuff of the Inconscient. This liberation is the purport of the
parable of Shunahshepa and his two great hymns to Varuna.
As ignorance or falsehood in the being — the Veda prefers
usually the less abstract phrase — is the cause of wrong and
suffering, so Knowledge or Truth is the agent which purifies
and liberates. It is because of the eye with which he sees, —
the luminous symbolic Sun, — that Varuna is the purifier. And
unless he governs the will and teaches the judgment while the
divine Thought is being learned, we cannot ascend on to the
ship of the gods to be borne by it over the life-ocean beyond
all this stumbling and evil. Dwelling in us as the thinker with
knowledge Varuna cleaves away the sin that we have committed;
he abolishes by his royal power our debts of the Ignorance. Or,
using a different image, the Veda tells us that this King has in
his service a thousand physicians; it is by their healing of our
mental and moral infirmities that we get a secure foundation in
Varuna’s wide and deep right-mindedness.
The Kingship of great Varuna is an unbounded empire over