We devoted an article to ṛta as a fundamental notion of Vedic thought, insisting on the fact that the usual translation as cosmic order was misleading and that ṛta designated something far more precisely: Truth, the fundamental reality of the world seen from the inside rather than from the surface. It is worth returning to this notion from a different angle, no longer only to clarify its meaning in the Vedic context, but to set it alongside what our era produces in its place: a normative chaos of growing density and complexity, which claims to regulate human life through external rules where ṛta regulated it through an inner reality.
The difference is fundamental. Ṛta is not a set of rules. It is not a code, a law, a norm, a regulation. It is a reality. It is the way things are when they are seen without the filter of ego and Maya. And this reality, once directly perceived, produces behaviours that accord with it, not through obedience to an external constraint, but because to act otherwise would be to act against what one has seen to be true. A man or woman who has had the direct experience of ṛta, who has touched Brahman in the sacrifice, who has lived the dissolution of the ego in the Light, cannot afterwards treat others as adversaries, accumulate wealth at the expense of the community, or lie for personal advantage. Not because it is forbidden. But because these behaviours rest on a conviction of separation that the experience of ṛta has directly dismantled.
This is a difference of considerable importance, and it explains something that would otherwise remain mysterious: how a civilisation like that of the 7 Rivers could function for two thousand years without an army, without a police force, without a penal code, without a visible judicial apparatus, without the coercive institutions we regard as the minimum conditions of any social organisation. The initial response of the archaeologists who discovered this civilisation was disbelief. Then the evidence imposed itself: the data are there, the cities are there, the public granaries are there, the sanitation systems are there, and nowhere does one find traces of an institution of control and repression comparable to those that every other great civilisation of the era developed. The only coherent explanation is that social control was internal. And that interior was ṛta, kept alive by the collective and regular practice of soma and the sacrifice.
Let us now look at what our era has put in its place. The contemporary world is probably the most regulated world in all of human history. National legislation runs to tens of thousands of pages. European regulations, ISO standards, health directives, labour codes, tax rules, environmental constraints, reporting obligations, compliance procedures: all of this forms a normative corpus of a complexity that far exceeds the capacity of any individual or even any group to have a comprehensive view of it. And despite this extraordinary normative density, or perhaps because of it, the behaviours that all these rules seek to prevent continue to flourish. Tax fraud, corruption, environmental destruction, exploitation of workers, growing inequalities: all of this continues, adapts, finds gaps in the regulation, circumvents norms with the help of lawyers and accountants who specialise in the art of respecting the letter of the law while violating its spirit.
This paradox is precisely what Vedic thought predicts. When the direct experience of ṛta is no longer accessible, when behaviours are no longer guided by an inner vision of what is true and what is not, rules become necessary. And rules generate resistance, because a rule is perceived as an external constraint that limits the freedom of the ego rather than as an invitation to see reality as it is. The ego seeks to circumvent rules because rules do not change the ego. They frame it, limit it, impose costs on it. But they do not transform it. And a framed ego remains an ego, with all its ingenuity for finding pathways through the meshes of the regulatory net.
The tenth mandala of the Rig Veda is the first document of this transition. One sees appearing there, for the first time in all of Vedic tradition, moral lessons, prohibitions, rules of behaviour formulated as such. And this appearance coincides exactly with the disappearance of soma, that is to say with the loss of direct access to ṛta. This is not a coincidence. It is a law. When the direct experience of Truth goes out, rules proliferate to try to reproduce by external means the behaviours that this experience produced by internal means. It is a substitution that can never be complete, because behaviours produced by rules and behaviours produced by vision are of a fundamentally different nature. The former are performative, the latter are authentic. And a civilisation built on performances without authenticity is a civilisation whose coherence is in permanent danger.
There is in this analysis something that should give us pause about the nature of the contemporary crisis. We do not have a crisis of insufficient regulation. We have, on the contrary, an excess of regulation that coexists with a deficit of ṛta. We have thousands of rules about environmental protection and we are destroying the environment at an unprecedented rate. We have sophisticated legislation on human rights and inequalities are worsening everywhere. We have codes of ethics in every company and unethical behaviour prospers under cover of formal compliance. This is not a problem of insufficient rules. It is a problem of absent ṛta.
The question that then arises is: how does one recover ṛta without soma? The Upanishads answered this question with remarkable depth and beauty: through yoga, meditation, pranayama, the study of sacred texts under the guidance of a master, asceticism, devotion. All these paths have produced beings of extraordinary wisdom and integrity, beings whose entire lives were an expression of ṛta. But they are individual paths, demanding, that require years or decades of assiduous practice. They are not within reach of everyone, and they cannot structure an entire civilisation in the way that soma and the sacrifice did in the civilisation of the 7 Rivers.
Contemporary research on psychedelics reopens this question in a way that we have not yet had time to fully integrate. The studies conducted at Johns Hopkins, at New York University, at Imperial College London, demonstrate that well-guided psychedelic experiences produce lasting changes in values, behaviours and the way of situating oneself in the world — changes that move in the direction of greater compassion, lesser egotistic preoccupation, a sharper awareness of the interconnection of all things. This is, in the language of contemporary neurology, a description of what the Vedic rishis called touching ṛta. The convergence is troubling, and it suggests that the Vedic path was not a primitive superstition but a technology for the transformation of consciousness whose mechanisms we are only beginning to understand.
What ṛta tells us about contemporary normative chaos is that we are treating symptoms rather than causes. The cause is the loss of direct access to Truth, the unchecked domination of the collective ego over social organisation, the substitution of performance for authenticity in every domain of public life. Rules will not cure this cause. They can limit its most destructive effects, which is not without value. But as long as the cause is not addressed, the effects will continue to proliferate, faster than rules can be written to contain them. Ṛta was not a rule. It was a reality. And the difference between the two is the difference between a civilisation that holds together and a civilisation that loses itself in a labyrinth of norms whose meaning it has itself forgotten.
Le Rig Veda 
Laisser un commentaire