A new approach to the Vedas : an essay in translation and exegesis

A NEW APPROACH TO THE VEDAS

in which it is established. The movement of the Spirit by which the Waters are stirred is not in itself a local movement, but local in effect, so that the surface of the Waters is thrown into waves, and thereby the reflection of the Light is multiplied, contracted and identified into variety. Aitareya Avanyaka, Il, 1, 7, “ As far as the Waters extend as far as Varuna extends, so far extends His world,’ asserts the fundamental doctrine of the identity of “ possible”’ and “ real.”

The striving and intension are not easy to explain: both imply conation, the latter (tapas) is precisely Hebrew zimzum. Tapas is not a penance, because not expiatory, but rather an anguish and a passion: a dark heat of the consciousness, a kindling not yet a flame, or to take an analogy from Physics, a raising of potential to the sparking point.*8 Notions of a smouldering continence and intellectual fermentation, as well as of a vegetative incubation, are implied. Tejas and vasa are forms of energy, respectively fiery and fluid: fejas the fire of love and wrath, vasa the elixir, tincture, or water of life. Tejas as element corresponds in part to “ phlogiston.”’

“ Broke forth as Fire’’: for “the Eternal Father is manifested in the fire . . . this flagrat is effected in the enkindling of the fire in the essence of the anguish,” Bohme, Signatura Rerum, XIV, 38 and 31, “ with the enkindling of the fire in the salnitral flagrat two kingdoms separate, viz., eternity and time,” zbzd., VII, 8, cf. “ the fire itself, viz., the first principle in the life, with which the light and dark world do separate,” zbid., 1V,8. Also “A third master has said that God is a fire. He too speaks truly, though in a likeness. For Fire is the noblest in nature and mightiest in operation amongst the elements it never rests until it reaches heaven. It is much wider and higher than Air, Water, or Earth, it comprehends all other elements in itself,’ Eckhart, from Biittner’s Schriften und Predigten, 1923, Il, p. 144.

Agni, “‘ Fire,’’ appears in the Vedic liturgies as the

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