Beauty of the Vedas
Paul William Roberts
of the Soul: Some journeys in India.”
Pg 299 – 325
In the beginning the Divine Will arose,
was the first seed from the Creator's mind
who can see deeper by putting their mind and heart together as one
the underlying essence of all existence was deep
all that exists,
the non-existent existing in the existent."
- RIG VEDA 10.129.4
Vedas are the quintessence of classical Hindu
Thinking with your heart; loving with your mind. All
yoga and meditation aim to attain this goal. Anything else is delusion, or
worse. And when the heart sees, it sees the unknowable,
nameless, formless, limitless, supreme God. He is called
the nonexistent because
he is eternal, beyond existence. God manifest is the fabric of creation itself.
They are one.The heart that learns to
think realizes this truth and merges into the eternal oneness. As William Blake
put it, “ If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as
it is, infinite.”
This merging with the Eternal,
this inner transformation, this direct experience of Truth – these are the
goals of which the Vedic sages speak. They explain the nature of the universe,
of life, while admitting that Creation itself is the one unknowable mystery. To
the Vedic sages, creation indicated that point before which there was no
Creator, the line between indefinable nothingness and something delineated by
attributes and function, at least. Like the moment before the Big Bang Theory.
These concepts preoccupy high wisdom, the Truth far removed from mere religion.
research and scholarship make it increasingly possible to believe that the Vedic
era was the lost civilization whose legacy the Egyptians and the Indians
inherited. There must have been one. There are too many similarities between
hieroglyphic texts and Vedic ones, these in turn echoed in a somewhat diluted
form and a confused fashion by the authors of Babylonian texts and the Old
the Hymn of Creation, (Rig Veda 10.129.3 )
the beginning there was darkness,
darkness, darkness upon darkness,
world then was merely its primordial essence, its formless fabric.
what would become this world was first wrapped within the
pervading power of the Eternal One
whom our material world is but a trifle brought into existence
By the omnipotent force of His will alone.
Yet the Vedas go further, being
philosophy, or really spiritual sciences, rather than myth.
Who truly knows, who can
honestly say where.
This universe cam from
And where it will vanish to at
Those godlike wise men who
claim they know were born long
After the birth of Creation.
Who then could know where our
universe really came from?
whoever knows or does not know where Creation came from,
one gazing at its vastness from the very roof of the final
Bible begins with the Creation. Before the Creation, however, there was the
Creator, but does even He know
what was there before He existed ?Long before such philosophical questions occurred to
other historical peoples, Vedism posited the existence of something more ultimate than
the one God. Whatever must have created Him. That is
presuming the absolute and basic reality. Or is it?
such a one could possibly know,
does even He know?
Long before such philosophical
questions occurred to other historical peoples, Vedism posited the
existence of something
more ultimate than the one God. Whatever must have created Him. That
is presuming the absolute and basic reality. Or is it?
This is mysticism that is
simultaneously metalogic and the kind of thing those bardic sages living some
twenty-five thousand years ago thought about a great deal, according to Hindu
tradition. The Vedas are the very first compositions mankind produced dating back at least
twenty thousand years.
Most orthodox historians and anthropologists strongly dispute such a view. They
confuse writing with civilization and deny meaningful history to any people who
did not leave a written record. A rich culture does not necessarily depend on
writing, as the Celtic civilization proves.
They are the most sophisticated, most profoundly
beautiful, and most complete presentations of what Aldous Huxley termed the
“perennial philosophy” that is at the core of all religions. In modern
academia, of course, there is not supposed to be any “ancient wisdom”
Vedas go much further in outlining the nature of reality than any other
religious texts still in use. Some
Vedic hymns paint the exquisite glories of the natural world: the preternatural
beauty of predawn light, its rosy fingers holding the iridescent steel-blue sky;
some celebrate the welcome cool of evening the scented breeze of a calm and
refreshing night, its basalt dome studded with shimmering pearls and diamonds.
permeates them, a reflection of Truth.
Vedas hold within them enough information to rebuild human civilization from
scratch, if necessary. I think someone did believe that might be necessary one
Vedas still represent eternal truth in the purest form ever written. And they
are what drew me to India in the first place, what kept me there, and what draws
me back still.
Technology has certainly evolved at a rapid pace in the last century, when man
began to gauge the quality of a civilization according to its level of
technological advancement. However, Arnold Toynbee, the greatest historian of
his age, maintained that the test for a major civilization was its fostering of
a major religion. The human race, in fact, reveals a marked deterioration in the
quality of its advancement over the past five hundred years. It's made no
progress. Yet progress has become a secular religion - even after Progress had
advanced to the point of enabling mankind either to blast the planet into a
radioactive wasteland or to poison it into uninhabitability. Better health care
and global communications cannot be considered worth this kind of cost.
After Darwin, who was, to be fair, misunderstood, the concept undermined those
sciences that developed around the same time as the theory of evolution -
notably archaeology, evolution -as-progess became intrinsic to the very thinking
process of Western man, conditioned into him from early childhood on.
all, the notion of advanced civilizations, of "ancient wisdom"
existing long before written history even began, was complete heresy in the
Church of Progress. The great cultures of Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Indus
Valley were admired for the impressive remains they left, yet dismissed as
ignorant and superstitious tyrannies dominated by megalomaniacal rulers obsessed
with constructing monuments to their egos and subjugating the masses with mumbo
jumbo. There is not a shred of evidence to support such a view, say, Old Kingdom
architectural achievements from such civilizations are feats of science and
beauty that have never been equaled. Could evolution-as-progress be supported by
a look at the Great Pyramid of Giza, the massive Temple of Amon at Karnac
compared to ....what? The Empire State Building? Canary Wharf? The CNN
Tower? Marshall McLuhan once wisely observed that you could determine a
society's major concerns by observing for what purpose its largest building was
is at this moment, according to their own internal evidence, that the first
hymns of the Rig Veda were composed and passed to this new species, our distant
ancestors. The level of understanding,
knowledge, and wisdom contained in the Vedic hymns does not just spring out of
nowhere. Nor does the language containing these, mankind's loftiest thoughts. The great Rig Veda, in ten thousand verses,
contains an astounding stock of some thirty-five thousand words, all of them
imbued with great elasticity and enormous potentiality for the coming of new
the Vedic sages, the three great Realities were Creator, Creation and Language -
all sacred, all interlinked.
is said in Hindu scriptures that the gods themselves envy human birth, because
only within time is there free will and movement. Eternity in the Vedas is utter
stillness; it exists entirely outside time, conceived of as that point where the
future meets the past. There is no stable principle of evil in Vedic philosophy.
There is no infernal realm for sinners. Its nondualism is really beyond
monotheism - which creates a fundamental duality of God and man. Evil is not
envisaged as a quality opposed to good. It is the absence of good, just as
darkness is the absence of light, not its opposite quality.
level of understanding, knowledge, wisdom contained in the Vedic hymns does not
just spring out of nowhere. Nor does the language containing these, mankind’s
is no stable principle of evil in Vedic philosophy.
is no infernal realm for sinners. Its nondualism is really beyond monotheism –
which creates a fundamental duality of God and man. Evil is not envisaged as a
quality opposed to good. It is the absence of good, just as darkness is the
absence of light, not its opposite quality.
behind all ephemeral truths. The Creation leads us to the Creator, to the
highest knowledge, which is integrated into one. Like the Creator, human beings
create, but humankind's creations are separate from humans themselves. Thus
Vedic God is an architect whose structures all exist within him. Nothing can exist outside the Supreme
Reality, and it in turn is within all:
It is always moving, yet it never moves.
It is infinitely far away, yet it is close,
It is within all of this creation,
And yet it is beyond everything."
- YAJUR VEDA 22.5
terminology for "creation" implies that it is the steady process
transforming asat, the unmanifest, into sat, the
manifest. In this sense, the entire-space-and-time continuum, all the vastness
and infinite variety of creation, exists within the existence of the Eternal One
- as if it were a concept in his mind. God is also called hiranyagarbha,
the "Womb of Light."
The Womb of Light existed before there was any other thing. It gave birth to
all. It is the sole ruler of all existence, maintaining and upholding everything
between earth and heaven. To the Lord alone, and to no others, we should offer
all our love and respect."
- RIG VEDA 10.121.2: ATHARVA VEDA 4.2.7
This Supreme Reality is not a mere abstract concept of philosophy, either. It is
a reality of the Vedas, whose invocation and evocation are essential for the
whole process of spiritual growth and the fulfillment of life. God is a dynamic
reality that should concern an individual every moment of his life. we forget
this, or ignore it, but many hymns remind us that God never neglects us.
" God is always near. He never
leaves. But near as He always is, no one and no thing ever sees Him. Such is the
great Art of the Lord - Poetry that is deathless, songs that will never seem
- ATHARVA VEDA 10.8.32
Vedic Invocations, which are deemed
animistic and crudely pagan by many scholars, merely invoke God through his
attributes and functions. He is the Force behind all of nature's mighty forces,
the Light behind the light; the Terror behind the terror; the Delight behind
delights' the Ultimate Activity behind all activities. Similarly, God's various
names in the Vedas are the one God viewed in terms of his attributes, functions,
and nature. There is no real suggestion of anything besides the One.
Yajur Veda (60.17) states that, removed from the context of its creation and its
relationship as the ruler of souls, the Ultimate Reality would have only one
name: Om which is written in Sanskrit and pronounced more like Aum and
represents the utterly comprehensive syllable, embracing within it the scope of
the complete phonetic alphabet containing the potential to create, sustain, and
bring about dissolution.
John’s account of the Creation begins at an earlier moment than the Genesis
account, and its similarity to Vedic writings is startling.
between a great deal of Jesus’ actual teachings, as recorded in the Gospels,
and Vedic spiritual science continues to fascinate scholars. Considering
controversies caused by material in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as other texts
suppressed or even quite clearly falsified, it seems foolish to dismiss any
Western scholars have tried to ridicule the Vedas.
subjugate and destroy a culture, of course, which is a major facet of every
imperial adventure, you have to regard it as worthless, savage, and primitive.
is without any form, yet dwells inside and outside all things
form and shape,
He is entirely free of error, faultless and pure.
is far beyond anything a human body can comprehend.
being the Divine Poet. He is
maintains peace and harmony because He is both peace and
harmony made manifest.
is present in all places and rules everywhere.
power controls utterly all the three regions:
the Middle-Air, and the highest heavens.
foot is rooted in things we understand:
the other rests in a realm of deep, dark mystery,
place far beyond the knowledge of mankind.
is substance of every great eternal law,
He can be perceived in the universal forces of life.
presence is there in the vast seas,
the teeming earth,’
in the soaring mountain peaks.
polytheism. Long before the burgeoning Hindu pantheon; long before Siva, Vishnu,
Rama, Ganesh, Parvati, Saraswati, Laxmi, and the 35,999,993 others, this is the
God of the Vedas, and religion in its most pristine form.
: Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India.
Paul William Roberts
13. pg- 299-323
Roberts graduated from and taught literature at Oxford University.
currently lives with his wife and children in Toronto, where he has been the
recipient of numerous screenwriting, journalism, and other awards. His writing
have appeared in Harper’s Conde Nast Traveler, The Toronto Star.