The Science and Art of Mantras

The Science and Art of Mantras

[00:45] Name and Form are Infinitely Correlated

Jai Guru Deva. Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

Today, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about a subject which has entered the common parlance in Western languages all over the world, and that is the word mantra, M-A-N-T-R-A, pronounced variously as mantra, or mantra, or whatever.

I always like to default to the Sanskrit because we are indeed teaching the Vedic worldview and in the Vedic worldview, proper pronunciation of Sanskritic terms is essential, because in the Vedic worldview, Nama Rupa Sahitam Bhavati Eva, the name and the form are infinitely correlated.

That means that if you don’t get the pronunciation right, then you’re bringing into being a form that is different to what you’re intending. And so, we are interested in becoming more proficient in our Sanskrit pronunciation.

And so mantra, M-A-N-T-R-A, is pronounced mantra. Mantra. Mantra.

I read in the Atlantic Journal, my favorite US current affairs publication, that the Republican Party has a mantra. I also read in the New York Times that the Democratic Party has a mantra.

And so, when we see people using the word mantra in these kinds of contexts, even in political contexts, the assumption is that the public has some idea of what a mantra means, and that is that it seems to mean, by these ways of using it, these common parlance, or in the common vernacular ways of using the word, that it means something that you repeat again and again and again,with emphasis, emphatically.

[03:09] Denotative vs. Connotative Meaning of Mantra

And so, let’s look at, from the Vedic perspective, what the word “mantra” actually means. We need to look at its denotative value, that means a proper analysis of its sound-by-sound literal meaning. And then we need to look at its connotative value, that means the figurative, that is to say, what is it implicit of? So explicit versus implicit, denotative versus connotative, literal versus figurative. We’ll dive into that.

Mantra, man, in Sanskrit, is a shortening of the word manas, M-A-N-A-S. Manas means mind.

The suffix tra is T-R-A, tra, which means a conveyance, a vehicle or a conveyance, probably conveyance is more accurate, slightly, than vehicle. In some uses, tra also can mean instrument or tool, but in this particular spirit of meaning, tra means a conveyance. Mind conveyance, manas, man-tra, a mind conveyance, something that conveys the mind from where it is to where it is not.

[04:44] Nivar Tatvam – Go Where You Are Not

And this is a very deep Vedic concept right there, embedded in our analysis of the word mantra, a conveyance conveys you from where you are to where you are not. And the baseline of the entire Vedic worldview is that whenever you wonder what is the best thing to do, the answer is Nivar Tatvam.

Nivar Tatvam means go where you are not or to put it in one word, transcend where you are. Transcend where you are. So transcend the state of consciousness in which you find yourself. This is what it means. It could possibly mean actually physically getting up and walking from here over to there instead,go to where you are not, Nivar Tatvam.

But a mantra is the conveyance whereby Nivar Tatvam, transcending the state of consciousness in which you find yourself and moving into a different consciousness state.

Very broadly there are two broad areas of mantra. There are mantras which are referred to as bija, B-I-J-A, bija.

Sometimes, in order to get the sound quality of it across correctly, in the use of Roman characters, and for those of you who don’t know what I mean by that,the characters that we use for most European languages, including English, are the letters A, B, C, D, and so on, capital and lowercase, that came from Latin, from Rome. These are the Roman characters that we use for spelling our words and there are only a limited number of them, 26 or something.

Whereas there’s more than 54 Sanskrit characters, and so in order to get, when you read something in the Devanagari script, Devanagari means the writing of the gods. The Devanagari script, this is the calligraphy in which classical Sanskrit is written. There can be no pronunciation errors because every slight change has a different character, a different piece of calligraphy, a different letter if you like.

Whereas in English, using Roman characters, there are no fewer than eight ways, maybe even more than eight ways of pronouncing the letter A. æ, ə, ɒ and so on, and so on and so on like that.

And you can see all these eight ways displayed when you’re typing a text message. If you press the A and hold down on it. You’ll see all the different ways that A can be pronounced and all of the different pronunciation accents that can be added to it to describe in which way is the A being pronounced.

[08:00] Bija Mantra – Working on the Level of Sound

In Sanskrit, no such problem exists. If there are twelve different ways of pronouncing A, there are twelve different letters that are used for that. So, there’s never any ambiguity about how a thing is pronounced.

Mantra. A bija mantra. Sometimes bija is spelled B-E-E-J-A in order to get the sound of it across correctly. B-I-J-A is also a common Roman character spelling of it.

Bija mantra. Bija, in Sanskrit, it means “a seed.” A seed like you plant in the ground to grow something. Seed mantra. Bija mantra. Bija mantra. Sometimes, the final A on a word that has a long A, that has a short A on the end, Bija, that final letter will be elided. To elide something means to make it evaporate or disappear. So, it might sometimes be pronounced or written as bij mantra, bij.

So, bija or bij mantras, these are the kinds of mantras that do not work on the level of meaning. They work on the level of sound. They work on the level of sound. There is a specific sound that is sculpted to trigger a particular kind of effect in the mind. Remember, mantra, mind conveyance.

And so, a bija mantra is a mantra whose sound characteristics are sculpted and designed to trigger certain kinds of consciousness experiences, a change in the state of consciousness.

[09:51] Right Mantra for the Right Person

In the practice of Vedic Meditation, we use a group, a large group of bija mantras and they are assigned according to the intended thinker of the mantra. There has to be a vibrational match between the bija mantra that’s used and the intended thinker of that mantra. Right mantra for the right person.

And then, what happens with a bija mantra is that it is used in a way that it has no reference to meaning. It’s used innocently, effortlessly, as a repeating sound in consciousness. And, if the mantra is correct for the thinker of it, and if the technique that the thinker is using is correct, both of these things have to come together. Technique of using, and correct mantra, correct bija mantra, then what happens is the bija mantra will become softer, fainter, quieter, we can say, subtler. And this increasing subtlety of the mantra is what causes it to become effective.

The effectiveness of it in drawing the mind progressively from one level of the process of thinking, thought starts in a very quiet place, in the bed of the deep ocean of consciousness, in the unmanifest consciousness field, a thought appears as something so subtle that the average mind cannot even recognize it or cognize it.

[11:48] Drawing Towards the Source of Thought

And then, as the thought, as it were, bubbles up to the conscious thinking level and reaches that layer, it becomes gross enough, and by gross, I mean the opposite of subtle, I don’t mean, “Ewww, gross,” I mean gross, as in not subtle anymore, loud, well-defined, and so on.

As it becomes gross enough, the thought appears inside one’s conscious thinking spectrum, and one is able to say, “Ah, I’ve had a thought. I remembered my friend’s name, the acquaintance I saw coming toward me at the party. The name hit me, after I was wondering what the name was.” But that thought, that name or whatever it is that that thought embodies the content of, it started off in a very, very quiet place deep down inside your consciousness and then gradually made its way up to the gross conscious thinking level.

So a bija mantra employed for the purpose of Vedic Meditation is a mantra that draws the awareness inward step by step by step and the mantra will spontaneously become more charming because the subtler strata of the thinking process, the subtler strata of the thinking process, intrinsically, are more charming than the gross conscious thinking layers.

And this is because the source of thought, the bottom of the ocean of the mind, if you like, from where thoughts commence, from where thoughts issue forth. That source of thought is a bliss field.

[13:34] Effortlessness is a Skill Set

It is pure bliss in its nature. Ananda is the word that’s used in Sanskrit, state of supreme inner contentedness. And every thought, mantra, or any other thought in that subtle realm has, well, there’s a charm zone. And mantra draws the mind into that charm zone. And the subtler a thing becomes, the more charming it becomes, and because our mind is built around a principle that always it will move, without effort, toward anything that’s more charming than whatever it’s experiencing now.

The mind is drawn step by step inward by the mantra until, at the subtlest level, the mantra just disappears. It evaporates, and the mind is left for a moment in transcendence. That is to say, consciousness simply experiencing consciousness, silent inner wakefulness. So, this is the use of a bija mantra.

And the technique of Vedic Meditation is based in, and this is to summarize what I said at the start of this, the use of specific bija mantras whose purpose is to bring about transcendence in a given thinker, different mantras for different people, and making use of a technique that allows for effortlessness. Because without that technique, even the correct bija mantra is completely useless to the thinker of it. It’s not able to do what it’s capable of doing if it’s not used in a way that is effortless.

And effortlessness is a skill set. It’s a skill set that you do not learn, pointedly do not learn, at home or at school or in any other kind of format, other than having a very pointed teaching experience, being taught by somebody who is qualified to teach you how to be effortless.

So effortlessness is a skill set and it has to be applied if the bija mantra is to have its effect.

[16:02] Vaidya Mantras

All right. Let’s put bija mantras aside for the moment, and there are other bija mantras; it’s incumbent upon me to tell you, there are other bija mantras that have other purposes besides transcendence. We’ll cover that in another time.

For the moment, in the time that we have, I’d like now to talk about the other broad class of mantras. And these are what we call, properly in the Vedic language, Vaidya Mantras. Vaidya mantra. Vaidya sometimes is a name applied to a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine, but the word vaidya literally means of the Veda, of the Veda.

And so to use the way that we do things in English to anglicize the adjective of Veda, we would say Vedic, Vedic Mantras, Vedic Mantras. And if we were speaking in Sanskrit, which hardly anyone does by the way, we would tend to say Vaidya Mantra, but Vedic Mantra is going to be our choice for the moment just to make a distinction.

What is a Vedic Mantra? It is a set of sounds. Now I’ll give you an example: kriya siddhi sattve bhavati mahatam naupakarne. Kriya siddhi sattve bhavati mahatam naupakarne. This is a Vedic mantra and it has meaning, and it is loaded with intention, a teaching intention. It is not a bija mantra. Kriya is activity. Kriya siddhi, perfection of achievement of activity.

 Kriya siddhi sattve bhavati mahatam. Sattve means that it pertains to pure consciousness. Sattve Bhavati, bhavati is the state of Being or to be, is or am, of the great. That is to say, the success of the activity of the great is based in the extent of pure consciousness that is had by the experiencer.

Naupakarne, their success is not based on the means. The means are attracted to the pure consciousness state. Kriya siddhi satve bhavati mahatam naupakarne. This is a good example of a Vedic mantra.

Another Vedic mantra, so many may have heard in the past, bhur bhuvah svaha, tat savitur varenyam. And sometimes Om is put on the beginning and on the end.

[18:53] Om and Omkaraz

Om is referred to as pranava. Pranava is used instead of using the word Om when talking about Om because too much use of the word Om by someone who intends to be a civilization builder, that means someone who needs to have possessions, who needs to have activity, who needs to transact, who wants to have relationships and interactive alliances of romantic or even platonic nature, someone who is what we call, in broad terms, a householder if they repeat as a mantra the word Om…

Sometimes Om is spelled A-U-M because it’s comprised of those three sounds A-U-M, Om. If they use the word Om, usually it’s spelled O-M, using the Roman characters, then too much repetition of Om will cause powerful sense of non-attachment.

Non-attachment to the fruits of action, non-attachment to the need to do any action at all, non-attachment to relationship, non-attachment to the body, non-attachment to the bodies of others. It is perfect for someone who wants to be a monk or a nun and who wants to live that life of blessed solitude, and to be able to live in a life of complete non-attachment. This is why we do not recommend the use of pranava.

Pranava is the word that we use to describe the word Om so that we don’t repeat Om too much. Pranava is reserved for relatively limited use by householders, and it is not what is often much vaunted, incorrectly by the way, as being “the universal mantra.”

It’s not actually the universal mantra. It comes from that subtlest layer of human consciousness known as the Omkara. Omkara, O-M-K-A-R-A, the Om layer. The omkara is that deepest level of inner experience where everything is reduced to a ringing, singing sound, a hum, known as the Shruti.

Shruti is a kind of ringing, singing sound that meditators frequently report hearing in deep meditation and then later on even outside of meditation. Shruti. Shruti occurs at the omkara. That’s the layer out of which all thoughts appear. Omkara.

[22:01] Gayatri Mantra and Surya Namaskar

And so then pranava, used as a repeating mantra, very, very good for monks and nuns. If you don’t wish to become a monk or a nun or have those traits or tendencies, then it’s better to learn other mantras besides pranava.

Vedic mantras. So, the Gayatri Mantra, the one that one facing the sun can recite. We needn’t use pranava at the beginning or end of it. We can just start with it as it is, Bhur bhuva swaha tat savitur varenyam, bhargo devasya dhimahi dhiyo yonah prachodayat. This is recognition of Sun rising in the East, often pronounced by devoted meditators when they see the Sun rising in the morning.

They may even rise themselves specifically, in order to gaze for a few moments upon the rising Sun and to commence a particular asana. Asana means a bending or stretching of the body, a position or a seat.

Asana, known as Surya Namaskar. Surya Namaskar, Surya is the Sanskrit name for the sun, but more than the sun, the consciousness that is vibrant in that contact of the Knower, that’s you, with the Known, the Sun, Surya, that interactive content, one and one makes three.

The relationship between the Knower and the Known creates a third thing, that’s that relationship. A relationship is the third thing.

Surya. Surya Namaskar. The greeting and bowing to the Sun is a particular asana. That’s a set of 12 positions that can be adopted with great health effect, but also for a variety of other effects, which we examined very closely in my course, it’s available to all of the Vedic meditators of the world, entitled Exploring the Veda. We dive into Surya Namaskar with great detail if you’re really interested in diving into that level of detail.

[24:25] Rishi – A Seer of Vedic zSounds

So, what is a Vedic mantra? Well, all of the knowledge that comes from the Veda, or from Veda, if we want to remove properly the word the in front of it, the article is not actually classically there.

Veda is simply the sound that Nature makes when Nature’s intending blueprint of creation, blueprint of Totality, blueprint of evolutionary process and processes. Veda, Veda. And so then, when we have a Vedic mantra, what we have is sets of sounds that bubble up out of the Veda, out of the Unified Field Consciousness, and which have been captured by various Rishis, cognizers.

People who are seers, who have cognized these impulses, they didn’t author them, they heard them and saw them. Rishya ya mantra drishtarah. Rishya ya mantra drishtarah means, it is a Rishi who can see the sounds. We’ll go into this in much greater detail in another podcast episode.

A Rishi is a seer of Vedic sounds, and this is the synesthesia that occurs in a Rishi, the ability to have all five senses activated at any one given time. The ability to taste, touch, smell, see, and hear, all five, the interaction with any object, form, or phenomenon, Rishihood.

So a Rishi is someone who has witnessed the bubbling up of elements of the cosmic blueprint, and these have been captured, and typically they are sung in a particular meter, and they sound poetic to listen to.

[26:40] Sanskrit: The Sound of Nature’s Intention

The Vedic language, Sanskrit, is the first child of the language of Nature. Sometimes, it is written up as “the language of Nature,” Sanskrit, but in fact, that’s not quite true. It’s getting close to the truth.

Sanskrit is a human language. It is an onomatopoeic language. We’ve reviewed that elsewhere, but we’ll do that again now. An onomatopoeia; zoom, sizzle, splash, slap, bang, boom. Every one of those words I’ve just uttered can be found in the Oxford Dictionary.They are onomatopoetic words.

An onomatopoeia is a word that makes the sound of the thing that it’s describing, and it is said about Sanskrit that the entire language, all verbs, all nouns, all adjectives, all adverbs, all articles, all connecting articles and phrases are onomatopoetic. The entire language is onomatopoetic.

And so, that is to say, the sound of it is capable of triggering in the awareness a form, nama rupa sahitam bhavati eva. The name and form are infinitely correlated indeed, is what that means.

So when we are talking about Vedic mantras, we are talking about the human language of Sanskrit, which is the imitation of the sounds of Nature, the imitation of the sounds that Nature makes when Nature is intending a thing.

When Nature intends the value of the fine level of feeling, it makes a sound. And if a human, a Rishi, hears that sound and attempts with their mouth to replicate that sound, the sound will be hridaya, hridaya, hridaya, hridaya, hridaya. Hridaya is the word which is the human attempt to imitate the sound of Nature intending heart. Heart. Hridaya, hridaya, hridaya, hridaya, hridaya. Hridaya means heart.

When we say means heart, the proper way of phrasing that would be that hridaya is an imitation of the sound that Nature makes when Nature is intending heart. That’s the proper way of describing it.

[29:24] Expressive vs. Symbolic Languages

So, Sanskrit is not a symbolic language. It’s an expressive language. A symbolic language is a language that we might use whenever we are attributing a set of sounds that we’ve decided on the human level are intended to describe a thing or an action, a noun, or a verb.

And so in every one of the myriad languages of the earth, the human languages, there are different sounds that have been decided upon by different cultures to describe things and actions that have to do with those things and this is why different languages have different symbols. This is symbolic language.

Sanskrit is not a symbolic language. It is an expressive language. By expressive, it means that if you are in your quietest consciousness state, in your least-excited state, and a Sanskrit sound were made within earshot of you, or if you made the sound with your own mind, hridaya, for example, you would experience three dimensionally an actual heart. Whether or not you knew that hridaya “means heart.” You wouldn’t even need to know that in your least-excited state.

[31:13] Thought-inducing Mantras

You would understand completely what shishya pragniva bodhasya karanam guru vakyata, what that means, what it intends. Shishya pragniva bodhasya karanam guru vakyata. It is the state of consciousness of the shishya, of the student, that makes into wisdom the speech of the guru, the speech of the master.

Without even knowing Sanskrit on the level of meaning, in a very inner, quiet state, if you reach your least-excited state, and you heard that phrase, or if you decided to cause that phrase to come into being, the full richness of its intention and meaning would be known by you.

And so when we go to a yoga studio and we hear people doing Om Namah Shivaya or Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare, these are vaidya mantras. They have specific meaning. They have specific intention.

They are designed to do something other than cause you to transcend thought. They’re designed to induce thought. They are thought-inducement mantras. Thought-inducing mantras.

Whereas a bija mantra is a mantra whose purpose is not on the level of meaning, it’s on the level of the product of the sound. And in the case of Vedic Meditation, the bija mantras are the sounds that are used to be a mind conveyance, to take the mind from the grosser levels of conscious thinking into the source of thought.

[33:02] Mantras for All Occasions

So that’s probably enough on the subject of mantras, different kinds of mantras, Bija mantras, vaidya mantras, Vedic mantras, and some examples of these.

I look forward to hearing your inquiries more about the subject of mantras. We could literally spend months on this one subject alone, just on this one subject. What I’ve given you is a tiny, tiny little fragment of information about the subject of mantras.

In the Vedic, worldview, by the way, in the Vedic literature, there are hundreds of thousands of Vedic mantras that are known for producing all kinds of effects. There are mantras that make a cook a happy cook, you know, don’t trust a grumpy cook.

There are mantras, Vedic mantras, a mother can whisper to her baby to cause the baby to drift off into a blissful sleep. You’d like to know those mantras, wouldn’t you? There are mantras that can help a soldier on the battlefield feel brave and courageous and invincible. There are mantras that can awaken in anyone an experience of complete kindness and warm heartedness.

Like that, there is every kind of mantra for every kind of purpose. The specific bija mantras that we use for the practice of Vedic Meditation are a class of mantras, and they are different to all those other mantras that have those other kinds of purposes.

So, that gives us some kind of an insight into the science and the art of mantras.

Jai Guru Deva.