What is final is the religious experience itself, though its expressions change if they are to be relevant to the growing content of knowledge. The experience is what is felt by the individual in his deepest being, what is seen by him (drishti) or heard (sruti) and this is valid for all time.
The Veda is seen or heard, not made by its human authors. It is spiritual discovery, not creation. The way to wisdom is not through intellectual activity. From the beginning, India believed in the superiority of intuition or the method of direct perception of the super-sensible to intellectual reasoning.
The Vedic rishis were the first whoever burst into that silent sea of ultimate being and their utterances about what they saw and heard there are found registered in the Vedas. Naturally they attribute the authorship of the Vedas to a superior spirit.
Modern psychology admits that the higher achievements of men depend in the last analysis on processes that are beyond and deeper than the limits of the normal consciousness. Socrates speaks of the ‘daemon’ which acts as the censor on and speaks through him. Plato regards inspiration as an act of a goddess. Ideas are showered on Philo from above, though he is oblivious of everything around him. George Eliot tells us that she wrote her best work in a kind of frenzy almost without knowing what she was writing. According to Emerson, all poetry is first written in the heavens. It is conceived by a self deeper than appears in normal life.
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The prophet, when he begins his message ‘Thus saith the Lord’, is giving utterance to his consciousness that the message is not his own, that it comes from a wider and deeper level of life and from a source outside his limited self. Since we cannot compel these exceptional moments to occur, all inspiration has something of revelation in it.
Instead of considering creative work to be due to processes which take place unwittingly, as some psychologists imagine, the Hindu thinkers affirm that the creative deeds, the inspiration of the poets, the vision of the artist, and the genius of the man of science are in reality the utterance of the Eternal through man. In those rare moments man is in touch with a wider world and is swayed by an over soul that is above his own.
The seers feel that their experiences are unmediated direct disclosures from the wholly other and regard them as supernatural, as not discovered by man’s own activity (akartrika, apauru- sheya). They feel that they come to them from God, though even God is said to be not their author but their formulator.
In the last analysis the Vedas are without any personal author. Since they are not due to personal activity they are not subject to unlimited revision and restatement but possess in a sense the character of finality (nityatva).
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While scientific knowledge soon becomes obsolete, intuitive wisdom has a permanent value. Inspired poetry and religious scriptures have a certain time- lessens or universality which intellectual works do not share. While Aristotle’s biology is no longer true, the drama of Euripides is still beautiful. While Vaiseshika atomism is obsolete, Kalidasa’s Sakuntala is unsurpassed in its own line.
There is a community and continuity of life between man in his deepest self and God. In ethical creativity and religious experience man draws on this source, or rather the source of power is expressing itself through him. In Tennyson’s fine figure the sluices are opened and the great ocean of power flows in. It is the spirit in man that is responding to the spirit in the universe, the deep calling unto the deep.