Curling Around om

I use the word "curl" gingerly anymore, because I used it, poetically, I thought, in my very first love letter and that letter was unacknowledged by the receiver. So now it belongs in the realm of heartbreaks for me if I'm not careful. That probably seems overblown to anyone who talks about curly hair, or wisteria curling around a tree trunk, but I try to find other words.

I mention this only as an example of how a word can resonate strongly in a person, although maybe it's not a great example if you've never tried to talk about your path curling around another person's. Yogis, however, recognize this to positive effect: chanting the name of god to create the hum of god in one's body, for instance.

If the hum of the universe, or god, has a human name, according to the ancient yogis it is "Om". And they believed that in saying "Om" a person not only speaks the name of god, but also starts an incredibly healthy vibration of god internally up along the spinal cord to the brain. That's onomatopoeia to the ultimate degree, it seems to me, and highly useful.

So contemporary yogis were not surprised when the Hubble telescope discovered that the universe hums, and quantum physics told us that matter is made up of energy waves. Nor were they when scientific studies showed that humming to yourself for a few minutes raises your spirits.

It seems natural that saying the name of god to yourself for a few minutes should be helpful since it directs your thoughts to god. And yoga is meant to be a very grounding way to connect the physical, mental and spiritual components of our human existence into one god-loving frame of mind housed in a carefully maintained temple.

So just as the language we know as Italian was systematically built, or let's say codified, around the poetry of Dante, Sanskrit, the language of yoga, was built for prayer. There is another word that is said to be onomatopoeic for the concept of peace: Shanthi. That's actually what peace sounds like according to yogis. As an English-speaking people, we have some reason to care about Sanskrit since words like devotion and service derive from it.

As I understand it, many Sanskrit mantras, or prayers, are constructed from particular sound vibrations and connect you with the talents of different Hindu gods. "Aum Gam Ganapataye Namaha" is the mantra of Ganesha, the god of new beginnings. I am in no position to explain how the vibration of the seed word "Gam" is meant to move you past your mental obstacles to a clear new understanding of difficulties, but millions of people in India, of all religious persuasions, pray to Ganesha in this way. If it works, I'm all for it.

I find this quite fascinating but there are less esoteric ways of understanding prayer.

In his Foreword to the 2004 The Best American Spiritual Writing, Philip Zaleksi writes:

The following, from the London "Sunday Express" of January 25, 1959, exemplifies the saving force of words. It describes the actions of three soldiers, marooned on the Greenland ice cap during World War II, who sought solace through prayer:

They knelt in the sunshine, praying continually. There was only one prayer they all knew, and they chanted it together unceasingly, as children recite a memorized lesson, uncomprehendingly. "Our Father, which art in heaven . . ." they chanted right through to the end, and then straightway back to the beginning again, hundreds of times, as though rescue depended absolutely on their maintaining an unbroken stream of prayer.

This ceaseless devotion buoyed their spirits, steeled their wills, and seemed to have played a key role in their ability to survive until help arrived. Contrast this with the avalanche of violence, hatred, and terror that assaults us daily through television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and the bestseller lists. What effect does this poisonous lectionary have upon our faculties of perception and cognition and in turn upon our ability to meet the world with faith, hope and charity? Words have consequences; writing is a moral act.

And so perhaps I blog not only to heal with words, but also to heal all the good words that have misfallen and now hurt unintentionally.