The sounds of Sanskrit ~ spiral

spiral of knowing

• svara: the celestial spirit of the veda
  (It was the glints and glimmers of light within the svara that led me into the heart of mantra).
• Sensing mantra, tantra, yantra
  (The whisper of tantra was calling, and when I followed, I found the whisper of mantra and yantra
  also beckoning me forth).
• The golden dawn of gāyatrī
  (I would be so bold as to say that every Indian national knows the gāyatrī mantra, and the majority
  of Westerners who have learnt a mantra would have learnt the gāyatrī, making it perhaps the most
  famous of all mantra to have ever existed.

  Over the past twenty years of my own life, the glow of
  gāyatrī has cracked through the apparent solidity of form, dawning its hue of splendour in a myriad
  of scented expressions.)

• maheśvara: the cosmic dance of creation
  (The dancing śiva – the effects of these sounds reverberate throughout the Sanskrit system and beyond. And the Lord of the dance sings forth.)
• mātṛkā: held in the arms of the mother
  (The mātṛkā are the energies that gives expression to the fourteen Sanskrit vowels, and the two directions that a vowel can travel in, either outwards, or inwards.

  Following their resonance we may find ourselves back in the sweet uninhibited embrace of the mother.)

• saṁkalpa: bringing the mother of the Gods to court
  (The words “not guilty” rang like an explosion through my being. The English judicial system had been ignited with the force of a love so raw and fundamental that the crucible of its transformation now howled through me. The mother of the Gods had been brought to court.)
• The āsya: the light rays of the Sanskrit language
  (“Letters with the same articulation are one”, or to put it another way, “when the unity of the inherent efforts of our being are seen, equality prevails”_
• The cosmos of the word
  (How did ‘the Word’ become flesh? And where exactly was ‘the Word’ dwelling amongst us? This elusive ‘Word’ is first mentioned by St. John in the opening of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. But what is ‘the Word’? And could turning to actual words help me to find the answer?)
• The cosmos of the sentence
  (Not just grammatical devices, verbs and nouns, are a reflection of the fundamental and universal forces of the formless and form, of the unseen and seen, and of movement and stillness.

  Each sentence is an expression of the interplay between these forces, and everything that we think or express is contained within the structure of the sentence, and so the sentence cannot be separated from our experience of life.)

• The four stages of speech: a voice unfolding
  (As a child I couldn’t speak in front of most adults: I felt as though I had an impenetrable block in my throat and my being would freeze as I failed to produce a sound.

Surrender
  As I lay convulsing on the hospital floor, my body exploding with resistance, my jagged mind splintering, it didn’t appear that my year of meditation on the experience of surrender was throwing me much of a lifeline.)