And, here's more on the Vedic Gods. People have said that much of the Vedas is ossified nonsense. Maybe so. Maybe so. The fact remains that the Vedas were probably relevant to their times. In fact, much of what is said in the Vedas remains valid even today.
Consider this marvellous hymn:
" Then neither non-existent nor existent was there,
no realm of air, nor the sky beyond.
Where was it all then? What covered it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
There was no death then, nor immortality;
nor anything to divide day from night.
Then the One, breathless, breathed within itself -
that one and no other was there then.
There was only darkness then, darkness wrapped
in darkness, all an undifferentiated chaos.
All was void and formless; then arose the One,
born of the heat of ascetic intensity.
Then desire arose - that was the primal seed,
desire born of the mind.
Sages in their hearts' wisdom know this:
the existent is kin to the non-existent.
Across the void they stretched a dividing line.
What was above it? And what below?
Seminal powers were there and mighty forces:
below was potential, above it energy.
But who really knows, who can say
whence it all came, how creation happened?
The Gods themselves are later than creation.
So who knows truly how it all came to be?
Whence all wisdom had its origin,
whence it formed itself, or whether not,
he, who surveys it all from the highest heaven,
he truly knows - or perhaps even he knows not"
This is an amazingly profound hymn. Certainly, the most profound that I have read in my life. It speaks from the heart of a man or, woman, who truly would have sat beneath the stars one night and, marvelled at creation and, wondered at the magic of it all. And, thought. Who made this? Who indeed?
Today, we have lost that sense of wonder. We write about the Vedas and, we analyse them to the death. It's easy to critique them but, not easy to write them. And, in the critique,we often get carried away by our own intellectual dissection. And, we become, like Ouspenski would have said, the living dead.
To lie under the stars, to stare at a flower and, to marvel at the creation, and simply to appreciate the world for what it is, to enter the spirit of creation. This is what it is to be - in the presence of Siva.