The Veda speaks constantly of the waters or the rivers, especially of the divine waters, and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun. The passage of the waters effected by the gods or by man with the aid of the gods is a constant symbol. The three great conquests to which the human being aspires, which the gods are in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to man are the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, gāḥ, apaḥ, svaḥ. The question is whether there is a deeper, a spiritual meaning, what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows, waters and the sun or cows, waters and the sky. It could rather be a system of symbolic meanings in which the herds, indicated by the word gāḥ, in the sense both of cows and rays of light, are the illuminations from the higher consciousness which have their origin in the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth. Swar itself is the world or plane of immortality governed by that Light or Truth of the all-illumining Sun called in Veda the vast Truth, ŗtam bŗhat, and the true Light. The divine waters might be the floods of this higher consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from that plane of immortality.

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