26 July 2013 - QA 9

Gurudev, can you please talk a little more about the sound/alphabet meditation?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: That is the meditation that we did today, where you can’t go to Ka without Aa. So, you went to the very source where the sound arose, right? What happened at that time? Stillness! The mind became totally still at that moment. Thus, we went to the source from where thought came, we found 25 minutes passed in no time. When you know all this, you can go deep inside.
These things are not found in any books; it has to come from experience, which is very important.

There is a beautiful ancient saying by a rishi (seer) about how sound is generated; atma budhya samethyukta.
When the soul connects with the intellect, and conjoins with the mind, then heat or energy is produced in the body. This energy moves the air through the voice box, and slowly, sound gets generated. To understand how this mechanism works requires a lot of introspection, and stillness, to go to the source of the sound, to find out how it is generated. It is fascinating.

There was a yogi who lived to the age of 103 or 104, and passed away about seven or eight years ago. He was given the title of Nada Brahman, because he could make a sound from any part of his body. Even, I visited him once. He could make particular sounds from different parts of his body.
He also went to USA, and the scientists were so amazed, they put electrodes and did a lot of experiments on him. He lived in Rishikesh, in the Himalayas, and practiced this for a very long time. He had a hefty, muscular body, and could make sounds like Ka, Cha, Pa from different parts of the body. It was interesting.
He was a very nice gentleman, but I don’t think he taught this knowledge to anybody; it left with him.
This world is full of wonders. At one point, when I was about 22 or 25, I thought maybe I should learn this from him, but then I had many other things to do.
Knowledge is endless on this planet, especially mystic knowledge.

I was invited to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The scientists there received me, and showed me the God particle, and how they found it.
One of the senior scientists there said that he had been working on matter for the last 40 years, only to find that it doesn’t exist. He had been working on sub-atomic particles, neutrons, electrons, protons, etc., only to realize that they simply don’t exist!

This is very akin to what the ancient philosophers used to say, i.e., all this is Nothing. Everything is Nothing and Nothing is Everything. All that you see as form is nothing, and what you see as nothing, is what is making everything.
It is a beautiful thing when science and spirituality realize that they are not different. Those who think they are different, are fools; they are living a hundred years back, but in today’s age, they are the same thing.

I spoke to the scientists about the three types of space:
1. Chittakasha, the intermediate space or inner space, where all thoughts and emotions float.
2. Chidakasha, the space of pure consciousness or energy, which here and there appears to have consolidated and appears to be matter.
3. Bhootakasha, the outer space, in which we see all the matter that exists.
What appears to be matter is really not matter, it is all One energy, and that One field is called Brahman, and that is what everybody is, that is what everything is.
The scientists were so intrigued. It is so beautiful that this knowledge is available to us in this generation. It is as good as having a laptop.

Just imagine, a few generations back, there was no Google. If you had to learn something, you had to go to a library and look through the Index and the pages. It would take two hours to search in the index in a library. Today, at the press of a button, you can get anything in the world on your laptop.

It is such a fortunate thing for this generation that all the knowledge in the world is available in no time. You don’t have to order books from across continents and wait for months to receive it. If you had been in America back then and you wanted Narada Bhakti Sutras, you would need to order the book from India and wait for months to receive it, but today, everything pops up at the tip of your fingers.

Similarly, we are so fortunate that in this age, science is speaking the same language as spirituality. It is authenticating spirituality, which means that no generation is deprived of this highest spiritual knowledge.