Agni

So I found something that talked about what I was looking for. I'm not the only person in this world who realized such a thing. Our ancestors too new about it and they used it in their daily lives.

All these general concepts are actually webbed together. So in order to understand one completely, you need to understand the others completely. That leaves you wondering where to actually start from. Its like finding a starting point in a circle or any closed loop. Anything can be a starting point and you can go in any direction or path. You will still learn the same stuff.

The Rig Veda starts with Agni and so I will also start from there. But I might take a different path than the Rig Veda and guide through my way of understanding.

AGNI:

Agni means Fire. This concept is by far the most easiest concept to understand because we know Fire well, what it is like and what it can do. We just need to look beyond what we already know.

The most important aspect of Fire is its attribute of consuming something to give out something else useful. We know that Fire consumes wood, oil-based liquids, certain gaseous substances to give out light, heat and smoke which are useful. Scientifically any substance that is subjected to its ignition temperature exhibits this property. What we are interested in is the property. Living thing also do the same thing. Don't they? Every living thing consumes something to give out something else useful. Plants consume Water, Carbon Dioxide and Sunlight to create or give out glucose useful for the plant to survive. Animals consume plants or other animals to give out all forms of energy useful to them for survival as well as waste that will be useful for the soil. What actually happens is conversion. Producing something out of something else is called conversion. So life forms do some sort of conversion.



The above diagram shows a block diagram depiction of a conversion process. Another aspect of Fire is the light giving part. Light gives us the ability to perceive things. We know its much easier to find things when there is light than when it is dark. This aspect of Fire was put to common use by all civilizations and still it is used today. Since light is associated with perceptibility, and perceptibility is an aspect of learning, light can also be associated with learning which is in fact true. We all know that a good amount of lighting is required for studying purposes. Words like "Enlighten" or phrases like "Throw Light" follow from this.

Now we have Agni being broken down into "Life Form", "Conversion" and "Learning". All these three are inter-associated. It actually provides clarity that when "learning", you can "convert" the physics of a system under consideration to and comprehensible model to gain insights of it. Also relating or "converting" the concepts into "life forms" enhances better understanding.

Chemists use this Agni concept a lot when analyzing a compound. I remember in chemistry lab, when I put a drop of some chemical on the chemical liquid under analysis, the colorless liquid turned into a red liquid signifying that it was some sort of sugar-based liquid. Here the colorless liquid turned into or got "converted" to red color liquid that aided visual perception of the contents in the sample. In fact all sciences depend on the Agni concept for development.

Now imagine if there was no such thing as "conversion". It will mean that there will be only one thing and one thing only. The earth wouldn't have had its splendor of variety in color and texture. There wouldn't be rivers, mountains, trees, etc. There would just be rock and only rock and no "life". The Rig Veda goes ahead to say that Agni is the basis of everything in this world right from the Creation of the entire Universe. Agni, according to the Vedas, made a sacrifice for the creation of the Universe and so its quality became the basis of everything. I will explain later in my blog the whole governing mechanism of sacrifice. At this point it is beyond the scope of understanding so far. For now just learn that when something makes a sacrifice for something, the former becomes the basis for the latter. In war, when the soldiers sacrifice their lives to protect their country, their patriotic quality becomes the basis of cultural development of that country. Hence sacrifice is something you should be very careful about. Sacrificing wrong things may lead you into big trouble. Another simple example, living things obtain the qualities of the food they consume. Scientifically, whatever contents were there in the food get possessed by the consuming body. So if the food had Beta-Carotene in it, the consumer would get the same and the Beta-Carotene would maintain its eye sight.

Sacrifice is actually a quality of Agni also. This quality is an extension of the heat giving aspect of Fire. Understanding this is again beyond the scope so far but I will explain later in my blog when I come to explaining the "Maruts". Metallurgical industries use Fire as the basis to manufacture metals with different properties. Here the main metal undergoes a sacrifice to be subjected to high temperatures that would disorient its original form to allow other metals and chemicals to be mixed with it to give it better properties/qualities. Similarly "learning" is also a "sacrifice". In order to learn you need to create room for other knowledge to blend/mix well with what you already know. So you undergo a "sacrifice", like sacrificing your ego that you know everything to loosen up what you already know, allowing room for more information. This is called being transparent, i.e. letting "light" pass through. "Learning" is an aspect of intelligence which is present in all "life forms".

So we have just figured out that "Life Forms", "Conversion", "Learning" and "Sacrifice" are inter-associated and this collective inter-association is termed by the Vedas as Agni/Fire.

Now a little more on the sacrifice part... if evil qualities exist in every human being, it actually means that at some point of time in the Earth's history, an evil human being committed a sacrifice. And all the evil qualities he had become a basis for mankind. To counter react against this, beings of supreme spirituality will also have to do the same. It's just like someone consuming a poisonous substance and then taking several antidotes to cure it. Why I made this point is to explain that sacrificing wrong things can lead you to big trouble which may take quite some time to cure.

The reader must understand that discussions of these general concepts can go beyond imagination and this blog cannot fit them all. So what I have explained so far in this post is not everything about Agni.