Veda and Vedanta are one side of the One Truth; Tantra with its emphasis on Shakti is another; in this yoga all sides of the Truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. But Vedanta deals more with the principles and essentials of the divine knowledge and therefore much of its spiritual knowledge and experience has been taken bodily into the Arya. Tantra deals more with forms and processes and organised powers – all these could not be taken as they were, for the integral yoga needs to develop its own forms and processes; but the ascent of the consciousness through the centres and other Tantric knowledge are there behind the process of transformation to which so much importance is given by me – also the truth that nothing can be done except through the force of the Mother. page 73 , Letters on Yoga , volume 22 , SABCL

The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swiftnesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses, — milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the God-Mind's radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymn and the wine and forms perfectly, — as a smith forges iron, says the Veda, —their great and luminous godheads. All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted. Page 29-30, Hymns to the Mistic Fire, volume – 11, SABCL

The goal of the path is the divine beatitude, the illimitable joy of the Truth, of the infinity of our being. Bhaga is the godhead who brings this joy and supreme felicity into the human consciousness; he is the divine enjoyer in man. All being has this divine enjoyment of existence for its aim and end, whether it seeks for it with knowledge or with ignorance, with the divine strength or the weakness of our yet undeveloped powers. "On Bhaga the strong calls for his increasing, on Bhaga he who has not the strength; then he moves towards the Delight" (VII. 38.6). "Let us call in the Dawn on Bhaga strong and victorious, the son of Aditi who is the wide-upholder, on whom the afflicted and the fighter and the king meditate and they say to the Enjoyer, 'Give us the enjoyment' " (VII.41.2). "Let it be the divine Enjoyer who possesses the enjoyment and by him let us be its possessors; to thee every man calls, O Bhaga; do thou become, O Enjoyer, the leader of our journey" (VII.41.5). An increasing and victorious felicity of the soul rejoicing in the growth of its divine possessions which gives us strength to journey on and over- come till we reach the goal of our perfection in an infinite beatitude, this is the sign of the birth of Bhaga in man and this his divine function. Page 463, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

Thus Aryaman sums up in himself the whole aspiration and movement of man in a continual self-enlargement and self- transcendence to his divine perfection. By his continuous movement on the unbroken path Mitra and Varuna and the sons of Aditi fulfil themselves in the human birth. Page 463, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

The Aryan is the traveller on the Path, the aspirant to immortality by divine sacrifice, one of the shining children of Light, a worshipper of the Masters of the Truth, a fighter in the battle against the powers of darkness who obstruct the human journey. Aryaman is the godhead in whose divine power this Aryahood is rooted; he is this Force of sacrifice, aspiration, battle, journey towards perfection and light and celestial bliss by which the path is created, travelled, pursued beyond all resistance and obscuration to its luminous and happy goal. Page 462, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

Aryaman, third of the four great solar godheads, is the least prominent of them all in the invocations of the seers. No separate hymn is addressed to him and, if his name occurs not un- frequently, it is in scattered verses; there is no strong body of Riks from which we can construct firmly our idea of his functions or recompose his physiognomy. Most often he is simply invoked by his bare name along with Mitra and Varuna or in the larger group of the sons of Aditi, almost always in adjunction to other kindred deities. Still there are half a dozen or more half-Riks from which his one chief and characteristic action emerges accompanied by the usual epithets of the Lords of the Truth, epithets expressive of Knowledge, Joy, Infinity and Power. Page 461, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

They are the two faces of Aryan kingship. In man they are a royalty of thought and action and the plenitude of wisdom and will; the King-Sage, the Hero- Thinker. In the Godhead, in Varuna "almighty, omniscient, thousand-visioned, whose form is the Truth", they lift us up to supreme and universal principles; we see revealed a divine and eternal majesty, the plenitude of consciousness and the plenitude of Force, Wisdom omnipotent. Power omniscient. Law justified. Truth fulfilled. Varuna, the Vedic symbol of this grandiose conception, is described finely as a vast thinker and guardian of the Truth. In him, it is said, all wisdoms are lodged and gathered up into their nodus; he is the divine Seer who nurtures the seer-knowings of man as if heaven were increasing its form. We find here the key to the symbol of the luminous cows. For it is said of him that, upholder of the worlds, he knows the hidden names of these shining ones and the thoughts of the seers go beyond like cows to the pastures desiring the wide-visioned. It is said of him too that he guards for the Maruts, greatened in knowledge, the thoughts of men like the cows of a herd. That is the side of thought; there are parallel descriptions for the side of action. Great Varuna is the continent and nodus of the world's uplifted puissances no less than of its arising thoughts. The unconquered workings that fall not from the Truth are established in him as upon a mountain. Because he thus knows the things that are transcendent, he is able to cast his majestic eye of sovereignty upon our existence and see there "the things that are done and those that remain to be done" (1.25.11). The things that remain to be done—and also to be known. The wisdom of Varuna shapes in us the divine word which, inspired, intuitive, opens the doors to new knowledge. "We desire him," cries the Rishi, "as the finder of the Path because he unveils the thought by the heart; let new truth be born." For this King is no whirler of a brute and stupid wheel; his are not the unfruitful cycles of a meaningless Law. There is a Path; there is a constant progress; there is a goal. Page 454, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

If the purity, infinity, strong royalty of Varuna are the grand framework and majestic substance of the divine being, Mitra is its beauty and perfection. To be infinite, pure, a king over oneself and a master-soul must be the nature of the divine man because so he shares in the nature of God. But the Vedic ideal is not satisfied simply with a large, unfulfilled plan of the divine image. There must be noble and rich contents in this vast continent; the many-roomed tenement of our being contained in Varuna has to be ordered by Mitra in the right harmony of its utility and its equipment. Who then gathers knowledge into this nodus or links divine action in this sustainer of works ? Mitra is the harmoniser, Mitra the builder, Mitra the constituent Light, Mitra the god who effects the right unity of which Varuna is the substance and the infinitely self-enlarging periphery. These two Kings are complementary to each other in their nature and their divine works. In them we find and by them we gain harmony in largeness: we see in the Godhead and increase in ourselves purity without defect basing love faultless in wisdom. Page 456, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

Thus the Dawns come with a constant alternation, thrice ten—the mystic number of our mentality—making the month, till some day there shall break out upon us the wondrous experience of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity when the dawns succeeded each other without the intervention of any night, when they came to the Sun as to a lover and circled round him, not returning again and again in his front as a precursor of his periodical visitations. Page 430, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL

Varuna represents largeness, right and purity; everything that deviates from the right, from the purity recoils from his being and strikes the offender as the punishment of sin. So long as man does not attain to the largeness of Varuna's Truth, he is bound to the posts of the world-sacrifice by the triple bonds of mind, life and body as a victim and is not free as a possessor and enjoyer. Therefore we have frequently the prayer to be delivered from the noose of Varuna, from the wrath of his offended purity. Mitra is on the other hand the most beloved of the gods; he binds all together by the fixities of his harmony, by the successive lustrous seats of Love fulfilling itself in the order of things, /mitrasya dhāmabhiḥ./ His name, /mitra,/ which means also friend, is constantly used with a play upon the double sense; it is as Mitra, because Mitra dwells in all, that the other gods become the friends of man. Aryaman appears in the Veda with but little distinctness of personality, for the references to him are brief. The functions of Bhaga are outlined more clearly and are the same in the cosmos and in man. Varuna represents the principle of pure and wide being, Sat in Sachchidananda; Aryaman represents the light of the divine consciousness working as Force; Mitra representing light and knowledge, using the principle of Ananda for creation, is Love maintaining the law of harmony; Bhaga represents Ananda as the creative enjoyment; Page 290, The Secret of the Veda , volume 10, SABCL