The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

510 Hymns of the Atris
to contain with compression and so to embrace and has given
us the ordinary Sanskrit word for friend, mitra, aswellasthe
archaic Vedic word for bliss, mayas. Upon the current sense of
the word mitra, the Friend, the Vedic poets continually rely for
their covert key to the psychological function of this apparent
sungod. When the other deities and especially the brilliant Agni
are spoken of as helpful friends to the human sacrificer, they are
said to be Mitra, or to be like Mitra, or to become Mitra, — as we
should now say, the divine Will-force, or whatever other power
and personality of the godhead, reveals itself eventually as the
divine Love. Therefore we must suppose that to these symbolists
Mitra was essentially the Lord of Love, a divine friend, a kindly
helper of men and immortals. The Veda speaks of him as the
most beloved of the gods.
The Vedic seers looked at Love from above, from its source
and root and saw it and received it in their humanity as an
outflowing of the divine Delight. The Taittiriya Upanishad expounding
this spiritual and cosmic bliss of the godhead, Vedantic
Ananda, Vedic Mayas, says of it, “Love is its head.” But the word
it chooses for Love, priyam, means properly the delightfulness
of the objects of the soul’s inner pleasure and satisfaction. The
Vedic singers used the same psychology. They couple mayas and
prayas,—mayas, the principle of inner felicity independent of
all objects, prayas, its outflowing as the delight and pleasure of
the soul in objects and beings. The Vedic happiness is this divine
felicity which brings with it the boon of a pure possession and
sinless pleasure in all things founded upon the unfailing touch
of the Truth and Right in the freedom of a large universality.
Mitra is the most beloved of the gods because he brings
within our reach this divine enjoyment and leads us to this perfect
happiness. Varuna makes directly for strength; we discover a
force and a will vast in purity; Aryaman the Aspirer is secured in
the amplitude of his might by Varuna’s infinity; he does his large
works and effects his great movement by the power of Varuna’s
universality. Mitra makes directly for bliss, — Bhaga the Enjoyer
is established in a blameless possession and divine enjoyment by
the all-reconciling harmony of Mitra, by his purifying light of