Garland of Sacred Syllables, VIII, part two

When I was first in India and first with Naga Babas, I would have loved to have had a manual. I would have loved to be able to read about what I was involved in, the background, I would have loved to have all sorts of information, but unfortunately, or, at least, as it goes, such a manual, such a book didn’t exist then, and doesn’t exist today.

My tendency has always been to look for some sort of printed material to use as my guide, as my map, in order to make this exploration. And whereas maps can be very useful in a very general way, the map is very far from the thing itself, the map is not the treasure. The treasure map is not the treasure. And this is what we have to come to grips with. So it is very natural when we’re coming across, especially alphabetic type of items, syllables, what we would like to refer to as letters, but I have forbidden this. We’re not calling this letters, because they are not letters. We’re not concerned with notation. We’re concerned, here, with articulation.

So the chart, what it is telling us, it is giving us a complete system, it is giving us some hints in terms of how to produce some sounds, basically by mimicking, where our focus is the sound that is being produced. And I can see this from a number of your questions and comments. Comments such as “I can’t hear it. I can’t hear the difference between ‘ta’ and ‘ta.’ I can’t tell the difference between these sounds.” And that is because we’re looking at this almost backwards. I want you to take a bit of a tour in the spaces of articulation in your mouth. I don’t want you to be concerned right now about how it sounds or even how it hears. I want you to be concerned with operations. This is the, this is where the phonetics, and eventually the formal system of Panini’s grammar is arising out of. It’s arising out of operations. Sounds almost mathematical in a sense. But we can explore and actually learn those operations by a process other than memorization or superimposition, superimposing sounds that we imagine, or we think we hear, or that we are trying to create. The authority in these syllables, in these articulations and in fact the authority for munthra (sp?) you will not find in the Moniet (sp?) Williams Dictionary, and you won’t find in the charts of alphabetic syllables, and so forth, you will find it directly in your vocal apparatus. And so this is the focus I am trying to make with you for the purpose of taking this trip.

Each place of articulation is like an analog. In other words, each space and each operation that we perform at each space to create the different syllables creates something that have reflections at a distance. There are mathematical reflections. These reflections in mathematics can go into the geometrical construction of altars, for example. There are reflections among the elements, because what we can find is that there are different densities in our articulation. Different syllables have different kinds of densities. So, we have seen how a syllable such as “ka” which is located as we can feel it deep in our throat and at the base of all other consonants. We can feel this. I don’t have to. I can explain it to you so that you can go to that place in your throat and feel it. But once you are there, it’s no longer an ideological item. You can feel that’s low-down, at the base of your throat, and it’s a simple striking. So we know that this has density. It’s at the bottom of things. And, we can see how the density changes as we go from varga to varga. We start out in the back and bottom of the throat, with “ka.” We move up one step, one varga to “Cha.”
And I want you all to please be pronouncing this as I am, so that you feel it, so that you experience it, so that you don’t just take my word for it. I am not trying to get you to believe in what I am saying. I am not getting you; I don’t want you to follow another ideology. I want you to move along with me in the vocal space so that you can do this on your own and you can understand this as operations. So we go from ‘ka”, to “cha”, and now the tricky one for English speakers, “ta,” where the tongue is straight up in the mouth, touching the middle of the roof of the mouth, “ta”, to “ta” where the tongue touches the teeth, and finally, “pa.”

What’s significant about density and about the elements is not to figure out which element is with which syllable, or which varga. This is a super imposition. This is one of the questions that I was asked in on the community page. So, what is important for us is in this process of exploration and discovery, that we discover things that are already there, instead of placing things that we can easily discover later.