Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index

On the Veda.

Aurobindo, Sri. (1964).
Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.


ISBN: none

Description: Hardcover, vi + 594 pages.

Contents: Publisher's note, 48 chapters divided into 4 parts: 1. The Secret of the Veda, 2. Selected Hymns, 3. Hymns of the Atris, 4. Other Hymns, Appendix: The Origins of Aryan Speech.

Note: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education Collection Vol. 5.

Excerpt(s): It is a marked, an essential feature of the Vedic hymns that, although the Vedic cult was not monotheistic in the modern sense of the word, yet they continually recognize, sometimes quite openly and simply, sometimes in a complex and difficult fashion, always as an underlying thought, that the many godheads whom they invoke are really one Godhead, --- One with many names, revealed in many aspects, approaching man in the mask of many divine personalities (page 267).

Soma is the Lord of the wine of delight, the wine of immortality. Like Agni he is found in the plants, the growths and brings out of it a divine creation. For him the mind and heart, enlightened, have been formed into a purifying instrument; freed from all narrowness and duality the consciousness in it has been extended widely to receive the full flow of the sense-life and mind-life and turn it into pure delight of the true existence, the divine, the immortal Ananda (pages 267-269).

But it is not every human system that can hold, sustain and enjoy the potent and often violent ecstasy of the divine delight...He who is raw and his body not heated does not taste or enjoy that...Only those who have been baked in the fire bear and entirely enjoy that. The wine of the divine Life poured into the system is a strong, overflooding and violent ecstasy; it cannot be held in the system unprepared for it by strong endurance of the utmost fires of life and suffering and experience (page 369).

Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda...He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful...And as the supreme and transcendent, present in those worlds the births of the gods...The birth of the gods is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being (page 372).

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