| From The River Of Heaven |
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| Books By David Frawley |
| SANSKRIT : THE POWER OF MANTRA | |
| Sanskrit is the language of mantra,
of spiritually empowered sounds. Its usage is to bring our minds back
to the consciousness and power of mantra. Mantra is not just concerned with sound but with
meaning. According to the view of the Yoga of sound, there is only one meaning
in life, which is the Divine or our own Self. Each thing ultimately means all things. Each
object is a symbol for the universe itself. Words represent this universal meaning broken down,
fragmented and compartmentalized. To cognize any individual object we must first
recognize its ground of being, which is the Divine. Yet we fail to notice this as it is immediate and
before the activity of our thought and choice. If we hold to this primacy of being as the meaning of
all objects, all things become doorways to the infinite. While ordinary language seeks more precise and differentiated meanings, spiritual languages seek an expanded and integrated comprehension until one is all and all is one. They aim to free meaning from its imprisonment in words and their arbitrary conventions. In reality, all things are meaningless in themselves, or each thing means the entire universe. It is only the universality of meaning which allows for specific meanings to occur. This inquiry into meaning is the essence of the Yoga of sound. It involves freeing our mind from its attachment to particular sounds and to the tyranny of names. The Tantric system also has an important Sound Yoga. It is best developed in the Kashmiri Shaiva works of Abhinavagupta (c. 1100 ad.). Sound is the body of the Goddess who is the Yoga Shakti or power of Yoga. Sound thus creates the current of force which lifts us into the infinite.
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