Garland of Sacred Syllables, VIII, part six
Consciousness and Speech Series VIII.
Sacred Speech Masterclass VIII, part six.
The Garland of Sacred Syllables, like that of severed skulls, adorns the neck of the Great Goddess.
There is a means of dealing with sounds that touch each other. That there is a Hermetic rule, from the Hermetic times in Europe, alchemical times, that, that when things touch, they change. And this is one of the basic descriptions and attributes of the Indian languages and those languages that resemble the Indian languages which are sometimes called, Indo-Arian languages, that this fact that sounds change when they touch each other. This is called inflection. The way that they change is dependent on their locations and the operations that they have in the vocal apparatus. In fact the distinguishing mark of Indo-Arian languages and Indian languages is that they are described as inflective languages, rather agglutinative languages where you just keep joining words, joining syllables to words and they become longer, and longer, without anything changing.
Hari: Just a quick question about the very last think you said. The example between the agglutinative, I am just curious because I came across this in something else just coincidentally, the agglutinative vs the inflective languages–
Babaji: agglutinative
Hari: Yeh, go ahead.
Babaji: agglutinative
Hari: Yeh. Agglutinative. Is that like pad-de- Is it all like consonant-vowel, is that what they mean where inflective is au, like the semi vowels. Is that, am I understanding it right?
Babaji: I will give you an example. If you would say in a simple way, you would say “I go to the store, he gave the item to me.” Now, when there is a “to” in front of the first person singular, then “I” changes to “me.” The meeting of “to” with “I” changes “I” to “me.” Ok. Now that is only one of many, many examples of how things change because, you see, in Sanskrit there is another device which when I first came across it was just mind blowing to me. It’s called, ‘santi,” (sp?) and what it means is that when you put several words together or your put a sentence together that there is a natural process of syllables changing as they touch. So, I will give you an example. If I say say to you, “Did you eat yet?” It’s very clear, you got all those words. Did you eat yet? But if I said that very, very quickly, without enunciating my words, I could say, “Jeet yet?” “Jeet yet?” And yet, you perfectly understand what I am saying. “Jeet yet?” J E E T Y E T. And this is built throughout our speech, that we severely abbreviate words, sounds collapse, sounds join together, all in legal, formal ways and what the Sanskrit language has done, it has formalized those unions in way that in English we can write in a novel, write in a short story, trying to imitate somebody’s accent, we could write J E E T Y E T and some of the readers would understand, but in terms of the grammar and the syntax of the English language, of course you cannot do that. Sanskrit has it all built in. And so, because of this, and because that there is no word order in Sanskrit, the functions of words are defined by their endings, that one can rearrange words to get different combinations of sounds, where syllables are eliminated, or other sounds are created, so that there becomes a great deal of poetic freedom of expression in Sanskrit.
Jennifer: I am worried about belaboring it, but on the religious stuff, I was really more thinking about Shiva and Shakti and Shivaratri, and my own going to the temple, and pujas and rituals, and the way I go to the temple is the way a Catholic girl would go to church. You know, I have things that I desire, I ask for them, I used to light a candle in a church below a saint. And in this temple we have all these wonderful sculptures of, there’s Saraswati, and Lakshmi and you know they are all there, and you know I will put in quarters or you know whatever and so I feel like it’s a religious experience. And so, I am not, that might be the way my bells and whistles are, you know, but I am thinking there is something else going on because, because you don’t see this as religious, but I think I am missing something.
Babaji: Well, no, I don’t see this as religious in the way in the West religion is come to be understood. So I am not saying one doesn’t become emotional or inspired or impressed or overwhelmed in a sacred space among people who are invoking personalities of Nature, or the Sky or the Earth, for their welfare and well-being, for the prosperity of families, certainly this is religious kind of phenomena, the problem is is that when we have a fixed concept of how religion should operate, we have, in other words, we have something to measure against, we have discussed this before, in post-Enlightenment times, when we went beyond the Natural sciences and we applied the principals of natural science to the human sciences, then we needed something to measure things against, so in terms of religion, we’ve established these categories against we can measure things. So I would…. What I am saying is that I think that if we are looking to obtain some knowledge and understanding, if we are looking to interpret in some way, a religious phenomena of a removed culture from Western Christianity and such, then we’re not going to get really accurate results, if … It’s not going to be strategic by applying the same principals. How does that work? You will see all the time in having a religious discussion about something, hindu, right, somebody wants to know, which text is that written in, right, where is the proof of your statement, “Does it say that in the Bhagavadgita?” “Does it say that in the texts of Sankara or whatever?” The point that I am making is that unconsciously we look for evidence and proof and means of interpretation that are not necessarily consistent with what we are trying to interpret.
When we are making this connection with elements in our speech, when I say that there’s a connection between the articulation of ka and the density of earth. It’s not a superimposition of that. We’re not having the idea that it should be earth; let’s figure out how it’s earth. This is a grounded articulation and striking. When we go to the the cha varga we find that this is where the base of the tongue, where saliva is coming from. And so we make an automatic connection, with water, no superimposing, not how is water connected with the density of the cha varga. No. This is where the water in our mouth comes from. When we point our tongue straight up, touch the roof of our mouth, we are pointing towards the light and we are pointing through our minds to the light. And, so we have this automatic connection with fire. What does the mind do? The mind digests the input from the sense organs. This digestion is also a process dealing with fire. When we point our tongue at our teeth, what do our teeth do? Our teeth break up the earth. They break up the food. Our teeth are involved in process. And finally, when we come to our lips, what do our lips do? Our lips are the final release of sound, of articulation, of expression.
Now these are not superimposed concepts. These are pretty obvious concepts. And I think that if, in your exercises, if you will attempt to go through these spaces and make these operations, you can feel for what’s happening in these places, you can look for what’s happening in these places, you can explore this rather than exploring an idea or a belief about this. And this is the way that I believe that you can have more intimate access with your own speech. I also experienced that once you have a formalized system that you become aware of in your speech, in your phonetics, you can you start finding these resemblances in your own languages, and the resemblances are significant. We can talk about that some of those resemblances next week, among other things.
Jennifer: Babaji
Babaji: Yes.
Jennifer: Babaji, I might be asking this for Michelle, but also for myself. At the teeth, there’s the processing, but I was expecting you to link that also to the element air. And then, the lips, to come with the element space. Because the others you mentioned the five elements.
Babaji: The lips, would obviously relate to, this is the articulation of sound, this is the release of sound, that obviously this will belong to space, the element of ether, of space. The process is movement, and would relate in terms of movement.
