Читать книгу Ashtanga Yoga - The Intermediate Series - Gregor Maehle - Страница 52

Learning and using Sanskrit is a spiritual practice in itself. The Sanskrit language is designed in such a way that you must use your entire brain capacity if you want to understand and speak it reasonably well. Further, the way in which Sanskrit is pronounced can spawn important changes in the brain itself. Westerners often smile at the “strange” way Indians pronounce words. Indians seem to speak more from the back of the head, which reflects the fact that they tend to contemplate for a long time before they take action. Westerners, on the other hand, speak mainly through their incisors, which may correlate with a tendency to act quickly and without deep thought.

The way Indians think and their outstanding contributions in the areas of religion, philosophy, and art are deeply related to how Sanskrit is pronounced. Indians articulate sounds using five locations in the mouth: lips, teeth, hard palate, soft palate, and throat. This way of producing sounds involves the entire skull and encourages the activation of the half-dozen energy centers in the head; these include the lalana or talu chakra, the manas chakra, the indu or soma chakra, the brahmarandhra or nirvana chakra, and the guru chakra. All these chakras are located in the area of the soft palate, especially at the rear and higher end, or in the direct vicinity of the palatal region and the cerebrum.

ENGLISH VERSUS SANSKRIT

English, like most other modern, nonmantric languages, has a strongly simplified grammar compared to that of Sanskrit. There are fewer grammatical cases, often no case endings, and fewer tenses (time modes). This has made it easier for English to jump boundaries and establish itself as an international trade language.

Another apparent virtue of the English language is its function as a vehicle of the idea of democracy. A complicated and sophisticated language such as Sanskrit, which requires a decade or more of intense study to master, will generally be spoken only by a small group whose members have the means to invest this time. (The ancient Indian sages solved this problem by reducing their needs and thereby precluding the need to work.) A democratic society is more likely to develop in a population that cannot so easily use language to differentiate between the privileged and the unprivileged.

While English has outdone all other languages in these fields, it falls significantly short in accurately portraying metaphysical and mystical concepts with a minimum of ambiguity. English simply does not have enough grammatical cases, tenses, or words for this task. Sanskrit is the language of choice when philosophy and mysticism are the subjects. It is no wonder that more than 150,000 treatises still exist in Sanskrit, and many times that number have been lost.

The presence of so many energy centers near the soft palate makes this part of the body the most vital and powerful for the purpose of yoga. It also explains the significance of three mudras (energetic seals): the Nabho Mudra, the Manduka Mudra, and the Kechari Mudra. In Nabho Mudra, the tongue is inverted and placed as far up as possible against the soft palate. It is used for the purpose of “milking” the amrita (nectar) oozing from the soma chakra. Manduka Mudra is similar to Nabho Mudra except that the tongue is actively moved left and right to make the nectar flow. In Kechari Mudra, the tongue is first massaged and lengthened, a process that can be drawn out and uncomfortable. Finally it is pressed up against the entire length of the soft palate and used to close the throat, thus achieving breath retention, while the gaze is fixed to the third eye. The prana is thus forced to enter sushumna (the central energy channel), and the brahmarandhra chakra (one of the palatal chakras) is opened.

The proper pronunciation of Sanskrit requires similar though less extreme movements of the tongue. The effects on the energy centers of the head are also similar but more subtle and spread over a longer time period. Sanskrit pronunciation of the simple word Ashtanga, for example, is completely different from how Westerners pronounce it. To make the sh and t sounds, Indians place the tongue in retroflex/cerebral position, and to make the various n sounds they place it in palatal position, which means that both the hard and the soft palates are receiving vibrational or mantric input when the word is pronounced. The same is true for many other Sanskrit words. Because of this, speaking Sanskrit permanently stimulates the cerebral chakras. Sanskrit is therefore the most cerebral of all languages in terms of not only structure and content but also pronunciation.

This is one of the reasons why most of the spiritually liberated people have emerged in India. If there were a map that showed the origins of the spiritually completed people of the past five thousand years, it would display only a few dots in Europe; a few more in the Middle East; a formidable concentration in Tibet, China, and Japan; and a vast sea of dots in India.