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The Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita constitute a trio whose revelations may be regarded as the highest possible reaches ever achieved by mankind. The plumbing of the depths of the very nature of all life, which seems to have been the occupation of the ancient Vedic seers, is really an unparalleled adventure in the history of humankind. The Vedas are principally known as Samhitas, a body of invocations, prayers, supplications, attunements of spirit with spirit and a vision of things which beholds a uniform, unifying principle in the highest as well as the lowest, in what may be visible or what is not visible, what is related or what is not related to the human individual— physical, natural or religious, or even the occupations of daily workaday life—all these became the object of attention of the great seers of the Vedas. That which cannot be known through ordinary means is supposed to be capable of being known through the Vedas. Hence the Veda is called aloukika or super-physical in its power of perception, while all our normal perceptions are physical and personal as well as social.

The association of the very content of the Veda mantras with the ultimate facts of life has been deified to such an extent that one of the aphorisms of the Brahma Sutra makes out that the truths of life can be known only from the Veda shastra. It is also mentioned in an Upanishad that the Veda, the shastra, the scripture, is not merely a source of the knowledge with which one can come in contact with the ultimate realities of life, but this knowledge itself is a sort of divine breath, an exhalation emanating from the great reality itself. The Rig, Yajur, Sama, Atharva—the Veda is the nishvasita, the expiration of the great reality of the universe, which means to say that the essence of knowledge, which is the constituent of Ultimate Reality, is in the Veda as a visible embodiment, an accessible means of final and infallible knowing.

The mantras of the Vedas do not merely act as a kind of textbook which convey through their words a dictionary meaning of their contents or a stylish interpretation of the intention of the author. On the other hand, there is a specific characteristic of the Veda mantras. This is so because the mantras are not supposed to have been written by any person. They are not compositions by a human author. Apaurusheya is the Veda, which means to say the the source of the Veda mantras is non-human, superhuman and spiritual. From where does the Veda emanate? How did it come into being? The great advance that has been made in a doctrine of the word, called spotavada, on which subject intricate textbooks have been written, makes out that the sound principle, which is the vehicle through which the knowledge of the Veda is conveyed, is basically an eternal vibration. When it is said that the Veda is eternal in its nature and does not constitute a temporal textbook, what is intended is not that the printed book, the bound volume, is an eternal body, but that the knowledge is of a non-temporal nature. The non-temporality of this knowledge arises because this wisdom of the Veda is capable of being communicated through various degrees of the manifestation of a vibration, which ultimately is supposed to be the substance of the whole cosmos.

The universe is vibration; it is not a solid substance. In the beginning was a great vibration—this is the doctrine of the spotavada. We say, in modern language, that there was originally not a manifest universe of galaxies and solar systems, but there was something like a potentiality to manifest nebular dust, a kind of bang, sometimes called the big bang, at least from one angle of the vision of modern science. There are many other doctrines of this split—the coming forth, the concretisation of this great vibration. It is not easy to define what a vibration is because we always have the habit of thinking that the vibration should be ‘of’ something. Something has to vibrate in order that there may be vibration. But here, in the case of this peculiar cosmic vibration, it is not something that vibrates but vibration itself that is the ultimate stuff of things. This position is inconceivable to our present mentality due to our concept of the energy pattern of the cosmic make-up, energy being a potentiality but not a capacity manifest by something else as a substance. The energy of the universe is itself a substance. Electricity is itself what it is. It is not a manifestation from something—it itself is all things in itself. It is a manifestation as well as a substantiality.

The theory of sound, in its most in-depth character, has been studied in India. When we speak, we make a sound. There is an articulation in the expression of language. This outward mode of the manifestation of our inner intention through expression, vocally, is the grossest form of the manifestation of sound. This, in the Sanskrit language, is called the vaikhari form of the sound. The audible sound is the grossest, densest, most concrete form that the vibration can take. But this vaikhari form of sound, the audible, expressible nature of the sound form, has an inner content that is capable of classification in a fourfold manner. This fourfold classification of the essence of sound, which is not to be identified merely with the sound that we hear through our ears, this fourfold character of sound is designated in mystical circles, in the Sanskrit language, as para, pasyanti, madhyama and vaikhari. In the Mandukya Upanishad, which is incidentally an exposition of pranava or Om, a suggestion is made of the possibility of identifying the stages of sound with the degrees of reality. That means to say, the highest form of sound-potential, which is not a physical content but a highly rarified form of universality, is just the same as the Reality as it is in itself. The four stages of sound, which constitute pranava or omkara, are set in tune with the four manifestations of the Ultimate in this Upanishad, known as Virat, Hiranyagarbha, Ishvara and Brahman. The identification of the degrees of the manifestation of sound with the degrees of the manifestation of Reality will give us some hint as to why it is said that the Veda, which is the embodiment of the highest knowledge in the form of potential sound, is the emanation of the Supreme Being Himself.

Knowledge is not an uttered word. It is a potentiality; it is a possibility; it is a capacity for expression in a particular form. The vaikhari form of the sound, while it is the grossest form of articulation, is motivated by a vibration which is subtler than itself. This subtle background of the vaikhari form of the sound is inaudible. The inaudible potentiality of the audible sound, vaikhari, is madhyama. The inaudible form of the sound is also an expression of a pressure felt from another thing that is behind it called the pasyanti, a still more rarified form. But the most rarified form of the sound is para. The word is very significant indeed—it is Absolute.

‘Amatra’ is the word used in the Mandukya Upanishad to designate this soundless rarification of the sound, whereby the visible becomes the comic content, and it is no more a sound but the very background of the manifestation of sound. We have five sense organs. There is a particular sense which receives vibrations in the form of colour—the eyes. Another organ receives the vibration in the form of audible sound. A third organ receives vibration in form of taste, a fourth one by means of tangibility, and a fifth one by smell. We seem to feel that there are five things in this world—that which can be seen, or heard, or touched, or tasted, or smelt. They are not five things, but five types of impact that a single energy has upon five types of receptive potentialities or capacities in ourselves. We receive a common content of the cosmos in five different ways, as we can conduct the action of electric energy in different ways—as heat, or cold, or motion, or water.

The chanting of Om, the recitation of the pranava, is supposed to create in us a sympathetic vibration in the personality, commensurate with the deepest potentialities of the universal vibration. When we recite Om, chant Om systematically, we will feel, if we have done it properly, that there is a slow rarification, a passing from the gross to the subtle of the sound that we make in the chanting of Om, until a state is reached that it is one with thought itself. It is one with thought and one with the whole being.

The higher is the potency of a homeopathic medicine, the greater is the action that it has upon the body, because the higher potency alone can touch the higher levels of our being, whereas the lower potencies can act only on the lower levels, such as the physical body. Our personality is equally a systematised arrangement of degrees of reality, as we conceive the same degrees in the cosmos. As we have Virat, Hiranyagarbha, Ishvara and Brahman, the visualisation of the Supreme Being in a fourfold manifestation, we have also a corresponding fourfold manifestation in our own selves by way of the manifestation of our consciousness in waking, in dreaming, in sleep, and in a transcendent something which we are—the Atman, pure and simple.

The Atman in us, the Self that we are, the true being of ours corresponds in our microcosmic personality to the macrocosmic Brahman. The one is en rapport with the other. The condition we call deep sleep is the potentiality for outer manifestation in the form of dream and waking. This potential causal state of our personality is sympathetic with the universal causal condition, known as Ishvara. The dream condition where we have a translucent manifestation of the mind, which is neither causal nor actually expressed, is comparable with a faintly manifest condition of the universe in a state called Hiranyagarbha. The actual waking state is where we are conscious of externality in its true colour—in this state we are one with Virat. The Virat is one with us in our waking state, through our visualisations, by means of the sense organs. We are actually touching the cosmic reality, daily, from moment to moment in the form of this Viratsvarupa. The many heads and eyes and ears, which the Virat appears to have, as told to us by the Vedas, the Bhagavadgita, etc. are our own heads and eyes and ears. They are not somewhere else. A transportation of our individual perceptional manner to a cosmic position would suddenly transport us from an individual to the Virat in a single moment. It requires only a moment for us to transport ourselves to the Virat condition—not years of effort.

The Veda therefore, in its form as an embodiment of eternal knowledge, does not remain as a textbook for teaching in a pedagogical manner in a college or university—it is a spiritual content for daily meditation. Today researchers have gone the to extent of seeing, in the inner meaning of the Veda mantras, many things that are more than mere prayers to deities or gods of the cosmos, but are even instructions on the daily fulfilment of our requirements, including political, social, economic and technological. The Veda is difficult understand because of its fourfold implications. Disciples, great sages appear to have gone to Veda Vyasa one day and requested the great master, “Teach us the Veda.” We are told that a cryptic reply of Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa to the disciples was “Ananta vai vedaha”—infinite is the Veda. Endless is the meaning of the Veda mantras. The endlessness of the content of the Veda is in its fourfold or fivefold inclusiveness of approach, which is not always available to us, humans that we are. The objective world is presented to our consciousness in one manner. This is also one method of the perception of reality—the world as an externally presented content to the sense organs, mind and intellect. But reality is not exhausted only by the externality that the world is; it is also the internality that the subjective individual is. The adhyatma or the individual is one viewpoint from which the knowledge of the Veda can be interpreted; the adhibhuta or external form of it is another altogether. But there is a third way which is predominantly known as the adhidaiva interpretation, the mantras being used as invocations of a transcendent content, present and operating between the adhyatma and the adhibhuta, myself and yourself, connecting us both.

This invisible content permeating through all that is objective as well as subjective is the god, the divinity that is adored through the Veda mantras under the names Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, etc. The bahu, or the manifoldness of the designations or names of these gods, signifies the varieties of approach possible in respect of the manifestation of this reality through various angles. The objective side is one, which is called adhibhuta, the subjective side is another, which is adhyatma, and the transcendent side is a third one altogether, which is adhidaiva. There is a fourth one which is adhidharma, a principle of cohesive activity to which I made some reference previously. Reality also operates in this universe as rule, law, order, system, symmetry and rhythm—this is dharma. Adhidharma is one aspect of the manifestation of reality. There is a fifth form which is adhiyajna, the activities of the cosmos, the manifestations right from creation onwards down to the lowest dust of the earth, including our own daily activities, individually. The ritualistic, activistic and relative performances of individuals in respect of the environment is the yajna that we perform. This is a sacrifice, as it were, the attempt that we make to commune ourselves with reality outside and above by social relationship, communication, work, sacrifice, cooperation, service, charity, sympathy, love, affection, etc. So at least among the manifold forms in which the knowledge of the Veda can be conceived, five basic factors can be stated—namely, the aspects of adhibhuta, adhyatma, adhidaiva, adhidharma and adhiyajna.

This being the inner potentiality of the meaning of the Veda mantras, ordinary linguistic interpretation or translation in an ordinary fashion will not bring about their true meaning. Ages passed in this manner when the visualisation of the Ultimate Being through the mantras was available only to great sages like Vashishtha, Vishvamitra, Guatama, Atri, Bharadvaja and many others who are mentioned as the Seers of the mantras in the caption of the suktas of the Vedas themselves.