Language of the Gods, Part One: The Primordial Mantra, with Debashish Banerji

Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore the language of the gods, by which I mean Sanskrit. With me is Dr. Debashish Banerjee, who is the academic dean at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Pasadena City College and the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Banerjee is the author of several books, including The Seven Quartets of Becoming, The Integral Yoga of Transformation, based on the diaries of Sri Aurobindo. He has also written Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st century, and The Alternative Nation of Abhinidranath Tagore, who happens to be, incidentally, his great-grandfather. Welcome Debashish. Thank you, Jeffrey. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Always a pleasure to be with you and to have this conversation about an ancient, sacred language. I think most of our viewers, and particularly Westerners, may not realize that English, the language in which we are now speaking, and Sanskrit are very much related to each other. Yes, indeed. They both belong to the Indo-European family of languages, and so there's a lot of similarities. In fact, there's many words in English that are remarkably close to words in Sanskrit, have the same origin. Well, and of course, because England at one time had colonized India, there's an awful lot of cultural exchange. That too, yes. Many Sanskrit words are common in English, but I imagine that's a result of the colonization, words like guru or pundit. Yes, a lot of Sanskrit words have entered the English dictionary, and that's due to, as you point out, the cultural exchange that took place during the colonial period. But also, a lot of words in the English language have great similarities to Sanskrit words due to the essential roots of Indo-European language. In other words, many of the languages of Europe are related to Sanskrit. Yes. Greek is the origin, so the Greek language, the Persian language, because what are called the Indo-European languages includes the Iranian branch, and the Sanskrit language have lots of similarities because of that. But Sanskrit in particular is associated with the Vedic tradition, the Vedanta tradition. As these languages branched apart from each other, the Sanskrit writings focused very much on yoga, meditation, and the inner life of the mind. Quite, quite, absolutely, yes. So the Sanskrit language developed a life of its own in India. Whatever language it came from was assimilated into the cultural atmosphere, the kind of speech of India, and so the Vedas were written in an early version of Sanskrit. It's called Vedic Sanskrit, and the word Sanskrit itself literally means well put together. Krith, which means to put together, to do, you know, and sans, which is related to the word sum, also in Latin and Greek, sum meaning to put together. So to put together well, well put together, Sanskrit, because it's a very scientifically designed language. But when we talk about Sanskrit, we are talking about a language that was codified by grammar variants a little later, while the origins are in what is called Vedic Sanskrit, which is a little more flexible than what we know as Sanskrit today. Well, I imagine it's fair to think of Sanskrit as being a language equivalent to Latin or maybe biblical Hebrew, languages that are no longer spoken, but that influence modern spoken languages. Indeed, indeed. And they were spoken for a long time as well, mainly as court languages. So a lot of the old texts, inscriptions, things like that are still found in Sanskrit. And right now, there is a big movement to revive Sanskrit in India as a spoken language. But that's, of course, a modern phenomenon. Well, it certainly was done in Israel. Hebrew had been a completely dead language for centuries. Now it's alive. It's spoken by an entire nation. So who knows? Who knows? Yes. What may happen. Well, let's talk about the Vedas to begin with. These are the oldest written documents in Sanskrit. Undoubtedly, yes. And one of the interesting things about the Vedas, to me, is that it describes a mythology of deities, very similar to the Greek and Roman pantheons. Yes, indeed, absolutely. For one thing I'd like to mention, since you said it's the oldest written language, text, text, wisdom text. It was not written for a long time. It was transferred by word of mouth from teacher to student and through very strict laws of memorization, it was passed down for a long time. And then finally it got written. But you're indeed absolutely right. It's the earliest wisdom literature of the world, probably. And what you were saying about the way in which the symbolism is very similar to the symbolism of the Greeks is indeed true. Because the Vedic pantheon can be matched often almost with a one to one correspondence with the Greek. You have the sun god in both traditions. You have the king of the gods, Zeus, in the Greek pantheon and Indra in the Indian pantheon. And they are both the lords of thunder. Yes. The thunderers. Known for hurling thunderbolts. Hurling thunderbolts. Right. And then you have the goddess of wisdom, Athena. And you have Saraswati in the Indian tradition. You have Aphrodite and you have Lakshmi. So there's almost a one to one correspondence between a lot of these gods. And that suggests that there were earlier peoples who eventually settled both in Iran and in India and in Greece. And probably also the Norse countries as well. There's definitely some Ur mythology which is translating between these different regions. Ur meaning original. Original. Yes. And I'd say with Zoroastrianism you find a lot of the same elements that are in the Vedas. The worship of the sun and of fire and the battle between the good and evil between gods and demons. So definitely there was some kind of ideas that traveled. And then in India you find that they get a special form, a form that relates to the spiritual life, the yogic life. So we know for example today that the Greek pantheon had psychological meanings. Yes. They were related to the mysteries. And people actually went through transformative processes by using these gods as psychological forces. In India there is usually a tendency to see the Vedas purely as ritual literature. But more and more studies are being done which are revealing that indeed there's psychological meaning to the Vedic gods as well. They're part of a transformative vocabulary, symbolic vocabulary through which people of that time were extending their spiritual life. Now there was a very ancient culture in India, the Indus Valley civilization, which had its own language, maybe pre-existing the Sanskrit. Very possibly, yes. And they, from what we know of that civilization, probably had developed the practices that are now known as yoga. Yes, very, very possible. If you look at whatever material records we have from that civilization, there are sufficient imagery that give us to believe that they knew processes of yoga and they were involved in invoking special powers, what we may think of as paranormal powers, to extend the power of the human being over the environment, over animals of the forest, and over other human beings. So they were using yoga as a means to derive supernatural power. I gather that the evolution of the Sanskrit literature must have had something to do with this Aryan culture with their pantheon of gods, similar to the Greeks and Romans, encountering this other tradition which was meditative and perhaps shamanistic and tantric and involved yoga. True, absolutely, I completely agree. So there was a shamanistic tradition, as you mentioned. In fact, the word for shaman-like beings in India is shraman. It just has an extra A. It's probably exactly the same word that makes its way to India and we get the term shraman. Shraman is a wandering ascetic, often with paranormal powers. So you either had individual shramans or you had groups of shramans that formed little collectives. And it's very possible that in the Indus Valley you had people of this kind who entered into society and were actually very influential in society. They may even have controlled the society, may have been like priest kings. So there is a certain kind of prevalence of these practices within society itself. And when we talk about the civilization of the Indus Valley, we're talking about something maybe four or five thousand years ago, contemporary with the early civilizations of Egypt and Samaria. Quite true. The peak of the Indus Valley takes place about, I'd say, close to five thousand years back, about two thousand seven hundred B.C.E. It begins peaking. But you find that its roots are in settlements that go all the way back to about eight thousand B.C. So there's a gradual increase in urbanism and in technology till finally we come to these extremely, you know, sort of developed societies around twenty seven hundred B.C. And it keeps peaking, it keeps continuing to progress till about fifteen hundred B.C. And then there is a kind of a desertion of these towns. And so that's the Indus Valley. And then the material records seem to dwindle after that. And again, we have a lot more activity, which we see almost a thousand years later, around the third century or say the fifth century B.C. Well, and this undoubtedly involved the migrations of people and the fusion of various local cultures and external invaders. But at the same time, I think what we're seeing is the development of a very refined philosophy in Sanskrit, the Vedantic tradition. Absolutely. Very true. Largely, the migration of people from the Indus Valley today is attributed to tectonic plate shifts that caused a lot of flooding and drying up of some rivers and flooding in other rivers. So people found it untenable to live in those regions and they started moving out. But you're absolutely right in that the literature that developed after this, the Vedic literature must have absorbed some of the practices. And so it's a language that from the very beginning is adapted to the spiritual life. This is why people have named it the language of the gods. Because it's, you know, also you mentioned that maybe in the future it'll be a spoken language again. There's one thing in that language that actually lends itself to the future very powerfully. It's the ease with which it discusses the inner life of the human being, the psychological, you know, depth psychology of human being and its possibilities. This is one of the reasons why a lot of words have come into the English language. But yeah, from the very beginning, there is an emphasis on that kind of vocabulary that will let us describe a deeper human being. Well, like ancient Greek or ancient Hebrew or Latin, it's thought of as a sacred language, not a secular language, although it must have had some secular uses. But sacred languages in general are different from secular languages in several respects, one of them being the notion of mantra. Let's talk about that. Yes, yes. So when we look back at the past, the Rig Veda is considered to be the most powerful mantric literature of India. So it's supposed that the hymns are, you know, a combination of sounds that have effects on the consciousness of the hearer and can transmit experiences. So this is the whole idea of the mantra and the theory of the mantra is developed over centuries in India, where people have given it very sophisticated formulations. I mean, even down to the 10th and 11th century, we have very important texts that are talking about the theory of mantra, about how some sounds have specific vibrational effects on the human system, and how words can actually be combined in such a way that they open up experiences in the psyche. Now, for example, probably most of our viewers are familiar with the Sanskrit mantra Aum. Yes. Can we talk about that? Yes. So Aum is considered to be the primordial sound. They give it the term or the phrase, the unwounded sound, you know, Anahata, which means that which has not been struck, that which is not wounded, because nothing has struck it. In other words, we think of all sound as being produced by the striking of two different objects. But as soon as you say that it is the sound that hasn't been struck, you're actually reminded of the Japanese koan. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Yes. In other words, we are being told that there is a causeless vibration to this cosmos. There is some original vibration that nothing caused, and that is the Aum. So there is a very important Upanishad that is all devoted completely to the single sound Aum. Now you've introduced a new word, Upanishad. Right. Let's define that. OK. So if Veda is the earliest body of texts, the next really important body of Indian ancient texts written in Sanskrit are the Upanishads. And Upanishads literally means to sit near. Upanishad means I'm sitting close to, sitting near. And so it has two meanings. On the one hand, it's talking about a social tradition of guru and shishya, the teacher and the student that is developing around that time. So that by sitting close to the teacher, by living close to the example of the teacher, by living in the environment of the teacher, they're picking up certain things. And the literature that is involved, that is facilitating that, is Upanishads. But we're not talking about any teacher now, we're talking about a guru, a spiritual teacher who is not just instructing in concepts or techniques, but in states of consciousness. In states of consciousness. And it's not just instruction, it's transmission. It's transmission, right. And the other meaning of that term has to do with the nature of the language. To sit near is a reference or a description of a kind of language that is really close to the truth. It sits, it's intimate with the truth. It's a language of intimacy with the truth. So what happens with the Upanishads is that it is a contemplation, a literature of contemplation, or whatever the sentence is, again, mantric in that sense, but not merely vibration. It has got vibration. But it also appeals to the mind as a set of premises for contemplating. And as one contemplates these premises, these mantras come alive and one has experiences. So this whole Upanishad that's based on the Aum is talking about the four conditions of consciousness, the avasthas, or the states of waking, sleeping, dreamless sleep, and the fourth unmentionable state. So the description of these is related to the syllables in the term Aum. And I think so from a very early time, Aum has been used as a mantra that gives access to the entire continuum of consciousness. And when you talk about the fourth inexpressible state of consciousness, I presume you're bringing up a kind of what we might think of as super consciousness. Quite true. So I think, first, the waking state is what we all experience, the waking state where we are in the world with our senses outwards. What is called the dreaming state or the sleeping state is essentially not just sleep, but states of trance where we turn our senses inward. It's the entire spectrum of the inner life, one may say. The third one is called shushupti, and that literally translates to sleeping in sleep. It's a reflexive sleep. In other words, it's a kind of lucid dreaming in which one translates from one state of normal dreaming to a state which transcends waking and sleeping, or waking and dreaming. And that kind of condition is already a super consciousness. And so that is the third state. And the fourth state is completely without content because one enters into a samadhi which is so transcendental that one cannot bring back anything from there. But one merges into perfect bliss. And then that is one of the stations of the continuity or continuum of consciousness. Now, I have a friend I've interviewed in years past, long deceased, who worked at one time at the University of Philosophical Research, Dean Brown, who was a Sanskrit scholar as well. He once suggested to me that the mantra om is also the origin, he felt, linguistically of the word human, that human and om are somehow related to each other. If we look at what is, you know, the deep nature of the individual. It's beautiful. That's a beautiful, you know, idea. And it may be very true. It's very possible because, again, as you mentioned earlier, Sanskrit is a mantric language, and there is an Indo-European family of languages. If we really listen to the Sanskrit sounds, we'll find resonance with a number of other sounds in the Indo-European language. And sometimes that's how we arrive at intuitive understandings of how things like this, the human, om and human, there may be a connection there. That is probably the origin of the human because the human is the being that actually, in potential at least, bridges all these conditions of consciousness. So it's the human. Well, we'll be talking in greater depth about these things, but we just have a few minutes left now, and I'd like to introduce another Sanskrit concept which I think is relevant, and that's the notion of maya, the goddess of maya, because it's almost like the old Monty Python saying, everything you know is wrong. So maya, the idea of maya comes in the Upanishads again, and it's used in a way to talk about the creation, the power of creation of the Supreme Being. For them, the Supreme Being is reality and everything there is in reality. So if the state of pure existence, everything that exists, is intrinsically divine, then from that, how has the world of things appeared, the many objects in the world and their relations appeared, and they use the term maya to talk about that. So maya has become a term that has been interpreted variously by various people. In its most essential sense, all it means is the creative power of Brahman, the creative power of the divine, and in that sort of term, in that way, when we look at it, it's really the self-reflexivity of Brahman, Brahman turning on itself. It's a monism that becomes a dualism, because the one looks at itself and its own infinite potential, and as soon as it views its infinite potential, it brings it into manifestation. So that power of self-regard is maya. Okay, now I was taught something different, and many people I think are taught that maya means illusion or confusion, that if we're not connected to that one source, to Brahman, to the divinity of absolutely everything, then we're trapped in maya or illusion. Is that also correct? It's correct in a certain sense, because if the self-regard of Brahman produces a word which is the self-description of Brahman, and you think that that is Brahman, then you're caught in a certain appearance. It is the appearance of the mirror of Brahman, but if we think that that is not really an appearance but it is a manifestation of Brahman, then we can find the connection back to the source, and that is the way in which maya can be overcome and not be a trap, an entrapment. I see it's a subtle concept as you explain it, that it's as if this delusion that we're in is also part of the grand plan of creation. True, absolutely. It is also part of the self-expression of the divine, and so if we take it to be absolute, then we are trapped, but if we take it to be something which is the expression of something true, then we find the truth in it, and so yoga becomes the process by which instead of escaping from maya's world, we find the truth of maya's world, and we can live in it as the divine sees it. Dr. Devashish Banerjee, thank you so much for sharing this half hour with me. Thank you so much, Jeffrey. It's been a pleasure. And thank you for being with us. Be sure to check your listings for Part 2 of our three-part series on The Language of the Gods with Dr. Devashish Banerjee. Thank you.