The Matrix of Sacred Speech
I am going to tell you a story of how Speech plays the determining role in our consciousness, in our experience of life, and in how we know ourselves. I will personify Speech as Mother Goddess.
As an initiate, guru, and now lineage holder in India’s most ancient and largest order of yogis and shamans, Juna Akhara, my studies and practices over the last 44 years in India are all part of an Oral Tradition passed down over the millenia from the voice of the guru to the ear of the disciple.
Although I have been teaching and writing about Sacred Speech since 1977, a number of recent events regarding our freedom and privacy of Speech (and thought) and the wholesale corruption of mass media, have made me feel the urgency to share my knowledge and experience about the nature and power of speech with a wider public. My goal here is much larger than the book. I believe we are in a civilizational crisis, and at its very core is that fact that our Speech has been diminished, our languages are degrading, and along with this, the control of our own lives and thoughts. Philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists and babas will all agree that our knowledge and our experience is determined from our Speech.
My story requires that I tell you about the great masters of Sacred Speech in ancient and medieval India, their lineages, their sublime teachings and practices, and how we may employ those teachings in our lives today. We will explore what a tradition is and how it works, how knowledge is obtained and passed down, storytelling, what a practice really means, and what constitutes authority. We will explore how Sacred Speech is actually used, in a spiritual discipline, in ritual, in mantra and tantra, and in daily life, for the purposes of self knowledge as well as prosperity. Since my goal here is to not only entertain you, but also give you tools for personal growth, we will examine many of the assumptions we bring into the study of the “other” (whether another culture, religion, or even gender), to free ourselves of those limitations, especially in these times in which our speech has been so compromised by mass media.
“…the very words in our mouths have become colonial subjects immigrating from mass media.” — Baba Rampuri
We will also look at how mass media has affected our speech, the use of abstractions and euphemisms, Orwell’s rules, and how we may reclaim our speech and our empowerment. It’s employment leads to prosperity – in the ancient Vedic rituals, as well as in the modern IT revolution; but its misuse leads to political and economic manipulation of the public, as pointed out by Orwell, with disastrous results.
The Matrix of Sacred Speech is not about the description and analysis of a particular language, even Sanskrit, but exploring the true nature and potentialities of language, emphasizing its role in effecting liberation; that it may be used by my readers as magical formulae to employ in their lives, not only to be more successful, prosperous, and happy, but, to have real relationships, to increase perception and knowledge, and to do good things.
Topics covered include:
•The Spiritual Mind
•Acquiring Knowledge
•Authority, Text, and Scripture
•The Enlightenment
•Panini, the Birth of Linguistics, and the IT revolution
•Deconstructing the Idea of India
•Deconstructing Yoga – Science & Yoga
•Mantra
•Tantra Yantra: practical uses and applications
•Sacred Grammar and Grammatology
•Yoga Sutra and Patanjali
•Storytelling – Myth Structures/Modern adaptations
•The Mother Goddess – The Little Mothers – Matrikas
•The practice of Sacred Speech •Manipulation of Speech – Orwell’s warnings
•Rules for empowering your speech
