The Himalayas – A Silent Guru – A Vedic Interpretation

My passion for Himalayas cannot be put into words. I have always strived to be there and directed every possible part of my thought and effort in making a short trip to the Himalayas. We all do everything possible to make sure we can follow our passion. A passion for me is that thought which acts as a severe pain and can only be cured when achieved. When I am in the lap of Himalayas, the everyday struggle to be there ends and a continuous flow of infinite energy sets in me giving me the glimpses of my true self.

Even after able to follow our passion we feel something is still missing and that craving for the missing piece makes us the seeker and we try to decipher meanings out of daily mundane things. One day I was sitting under a pine tree in Uttarakhand taking a break during the ride, I was analysing the efforts and sacrifices that I made to be there in that moment. Everyday activities in my city life started projecting itself and my mind wandered for a moment to find the best moment out of daily city life. I wandered more and concluded that the best moment in city life for me is my time spent in reading book every morning. My mind was completely unaware of the surroundings and kept on thinking about the books I have read and suddenly the whole landscape in front of me along with the mountain peak started communicating with me. The Vedic Hymns which I was thinking about equalised its harmony of meters (Chhand) with the harmony of rivers , ponds , trees , mountains. The whole meaning of the verse that I deciphered to be ritualistic in sense, started to reveal its true meaning though the landscape in front of me. The whole symbolic interpretation of the Vedic rituals revealed itself to me. I became the Yajmāna , by performing the action which is  Yajńa by giving the oblation or sacrifice in the form of ghritam or clarified butter which is the thought or the mind.

The Vedic rituals says that the Yajmāna gets the fruits of offering in the form of cows and horses etc. When I looked through Yāskachārya’s authored Niruktam, which is a Vedic glossary telling us the meanings of words in context of its usage in a particular verse, I found that the word ‘’go’’ means both cow and light and it means ‘light’ when used with ‘aśva’. The cow and horse, ‘go’ and ‘aśva’ are constantly associated. Usha, the Dawn is described in Niruktam as “gomatī aśvavatī”; Dawn gives to the sacrificer horses and cows. As applied to the physical dawn ‘gomatī’ means accompanied by or bringing the rays of light and is an image of dawn of illumination in the human mind. The study of the Vedic horse led me to the conclusion that ‘go’ and ‘aśva’ represent two companion ideas of Light and Energy, Consciousness and Force, which are double or twin aspects of all the activities of existence. Therefore the two chief fruits of Vedic sacrifice, wealth of cows and wealth of horses, were symbolic of richness of mental illumination and abundance of vital energy. 

That moment made me realise that the mental passage through which I just went was the real message hidden in Vedic texts. It is all symbolic and can only be realised by the harmony we see in nature outside us. When the psychological bliss is achieved , in that moment the internal and the external harmony equalises, and the mind becomes the mirror, just like a pond with still water whose stillness reflects the mountain top in itself. 

I started riding again after a short break realising that if I want the fruits and offerings in the form of mental illumination and abundance of vital energy I should be the Yajmāna performing my daily Yajńa  or action by giving the oblation of clarified butter or most analysed thought. Himalaya is my Guru as it deciphers every hidden meaning which I am looking for. All I would like to say that if we want to achieve peace and happiness we have to act wisely and sacrificing all that is in the way of achieving it. Be passionate. Be the Yajmāna and act.

I would like to end this blog with a quote from Sri Aurobindo: “ Thus there emerged in my mind , revealing itself as it were out of the ancient verses, a Veda which was throughout the Scripture of a great and antique religion already equipped with a profound psychological discipline, —a Scripture not confused in thought or primitive in its substance, not a medley of heterogeneous or barbarous elements, but one, complete and self conscious in its purpose and in its purport, veiled indeed by the cover, sometimes thick, sometimes transparent, of another and material sense, but never losing sight even for a single moment of its high spiritual aim and tendency”.