SOUNDS of SHIVA
Legend has it that, a long time ago on Earth, the whole creation was in turmoil. Misery afflicted all beings as the forces of darkness covered the whole planet in a veil of darkness, suffering, ignorance and greed.
Slowly, Humanity began to forget their true selves, losing their abilities of multidimensional communication, forgetting their original language, forgetting who they were. The experience of light had been lost.
Those not caught in these cycles of amnesia, those who still Remembered the Beauty of the Divine, such as the sages, seers and demigods, pondered what to do. The scale of the illusion was so great they knew they did not have the power to deal with it — there was just too much to handle.
The wisest and bravest of them stepped forward. In a flash of mystic intuition, they collectively realised that the Lord of the Dance, Maheshwara Siva, had to dance his Dance of Destruction, the Tandava, once again, in order to restore the rhythm of the Cosmos, to bring back the “music of the spheres” that held the heavenly bodies, and our bodies, in harmony. In this realisation, they asked Shiva to revive the natural, rhythmic intelligence of the Creation; to dissolve the disjointed rhythms and dark forms of thought that man had created.
Shiva smiled, moving his limbs gracefully, slowly out of meditation. As he assumed the Nataraja posture, mudras held aloft, Indias philosophers, yogis, and Seers watched on. Slowly at first, in total equipoise, Shivas many arms start to form the mudras of the Tandava, the Dance of Destruction and regeneration, gaining speed and power with each successive pose, each whirl of the arms, each spin around His axis. All around Him a blazing corona of fire cocoons him in space as he whirls, faster and faster, beyond the speed of light, beyond the barrier of this universe. Rhythms of atomic power start to wreak chaos, destroying everything in sight.
Gradually, a diffused light appears, permeating, seeping throughout the fabric of space. As his wild movements slow for a moment, we see He is dancing on the body of the demon dwarf Apasmara — the embodiment of forgetfulness, amnesia incarnate.
Crushing Apasmara under his uplifted foot, totally annihilating it, the entire vast expanse of space, of consciousness itself, becomes illumined, in a single, infinite moment of total Awareness.
Everything stops.
In this moment of complete stillness, Shiva beats out on his hourglass drum fourteen beats in a perfect rhythm, fourteen pulses of sound to restore the harmony of creation after the old creation has been destroyed, realigning the creation to the “music of the spheres”, a harmony and rhythm that mirrors the movements of space and time itself.
After destroying the old creation through the furious dance of destruction, the time comes to begin again. A time of regeneration, of resurrection where the original root vibrations of humanity are restored, “resounded” throughout the world again, realigning humanity to their original blueprint.
These sounds are the Maheshwara Sutras.
INTRODUCTION
Maheshwara means the sea of undifferentiated Oneness. In this sea there are no dualities or differences — everything is equal, free of all pleasure, suffering and pain, situated in total bliss. It is that which is “greater than all of that placed in creation”, (Brahma Vaivarta Purana) beyond the dance of polarities and opposites that constitute our reality. Maheshwara is a state of Pure Awareness that does not recognise any individual difference. In this Awareness, our individual thoughts and personalities, , dissolve and merge into the Ocean of Awareness, similar to the way that a drop of water returns to the sea, merging into it, becoming the same, identity less and part of the Universal. For as water poured into water is but water, and just as the rays of the sun do not differ from the Sun itself, so is Maheshwara. Here, the awareness of being a separate entity, a fragment of the whole situated in its own individual awareness separate from everyone else, merges into a Universal Awareness, where differences cease to exist.
The Maheshwara Sutras are a Self Revealed, and therefore Self Evident exposition on the composition of our reality. They are known as apauruseya; a term indicating that they have no human origin. Granted, they have been received by the great Sages and Rsis of India, but these sages never claimed authorship. They simply propounded knowledge that had been revealed to them. Self Revealed means it has no human author — it has come directly from the One Self, this One, undifferentiated field of Maheshwara. The importance of the Maheshwara Sutra can be gauged by the audience present at its revealing, the cream of Indias philosophers, yogis and sages. All of these beings were present in order to receive the teaching, for they were to become the subsequent teachers of Indias lineages in multiple disciplines, from yoga to meditation to music and dance; all these teachers were taught here, by Shiva, in the Maheshwara Sutra. Their knowledge which the world so appreciates today, was founded here, in this Sutra.
Some of the illustrious enlightened beings present included the Four Kumaras, “the pure in heart, blessed for they see God,” the SelfBorn, Christlike Sons of God, and the initiators of the oldest and purest lineages in India; Patanjali, the writer of the Yoga Sutras, the authoritative text on Union with God and the Caraka Samhita, the root text on Ayurveda, the science of life, health and healing; Panini, the founder of Sanskrit Grammar, the programming code of language and the thoughts that language stems from; and Nandikeshvara, inventor of classical Indian Dance and rhythm, as well as being the teacher of Patanjali and Vasistha, two of Indias greatest sages.
Its importance cannot be over emphasized as one of the six root branches or “limbs” of the Vedas, the basis of Vedic life, spiritual enquiry and philosophy, as well as serving as a practical means to Awakening through the science of sound, or “siksa”. The Sutra is one of the ciphers or sound keys to decipher all language, mapping out the unfolding of time and space from the Big Bang to the creation of our sense organs in a sequence of syllable, meaning, and perception. From start to finish, the Maheshwara Sutra shows the journey of “the Existent Self of all phenomena…. generated in all its detail on account of its communion through all the sounds from the first, A, to the last, HA. “[1]
The fourteen classes of sound and forty two syllables of the Maheshwara Sutra form the singular seeds and basis of the Sanskrit alphabet, the alphabet of Creation, the language of the Gods “for the gods clothe themselves in mantra, and it is only by mantra that they can be revealed.” All Sanskrit derives from this Sutra, in its most concise and scientific form — a science of sound that explains the workings of our perceptual mechanisms and the Universe we live in through vibration, perception and meaning.
The Sutra was also a well used “technology of consciousness,” as it forms the basis of all Sanskrit Grammar, the programming code and substructure of language, that in turn is the basis of thought patterns that create the perceptions of reality we all share in. Various spiritual practices have been used to directly access this knowledge.
Sutra means thread, and by this conciseness of explanation, an entire body of knowledge can be encapsulated in a highly mnemonic or seed form, threaded together like jewels on a string, each one leading to, and explaining the other. This condensation of multiple layers of meaning into one sutra or seed syllable is “grown out” into full understanding, to reveal the totality of the sutras wisdom through the expert teacher. Here Insight and Wisdom are the “waters” that grow the thread or “bud” of the sutra out into its fully explicated, and understandable form, unfolding its many petals of meaning into full bloom and manifestation.
The fourteen Maheshwara sutras are said to contain the seeds of all possible articulate sounds produced through the human vocal apparatus in a sequence, a specific order that mirrors the micro and macro scales of creation, from the formation of the human body through to the formation of the Universe after the Big Bang. This sequence covers all the ways that the human voice can mould sound into expression, precisely detailing all the ways sound can be pronounced. As such, it shows how vibration weaves together the cosmos and the individual together, detailing the structures of our perceptions and beliefs, in geometrical “shapes of sound” and “shapes of consciousness.” These geometries of consciousness and shapes of sound are verifiable phenomena, as illustrated throughout this book in the photographs taken by the Cymascope[2].The most intrinsic of these geometries are known as “quantum geometries.” In modern physics, they are understood to underlie the visible processes of creation, which is understood to be a vortex form. This vortex or “twistor” picture of creation, where left and right handed (male and female) spirals rotate and meet in clockwise and anti clockwise spin cycles, describes the reflective nature of all phenomena, of all appearance, ultimately showing how duality in unity, the “many and the one” is possible, and how it is formed through the structures of sound, language, and thought.
Language itself is the patterning of duality, for thought is formed by language.
Language is also concerned with meaning, meaning that is generated by our social, and internal use of language in thinking. Meaning itself lies within language, as an essential part of culture, communication in the information age, and evolution, for “ Reality is an ongoing, everchanging two way dialogue between the individual , society, and nature,”[3] with science, art, spiritual enquiry and experience an essential part of this dialogue.
The Maheshwara Sutras show these correlations between sound, language, meaning, and thought, as the underlying patterns to our behaviour, culture, politics and perceptions, for anywhere we communicate is governed by language of one sort or another. Yet, all these different realms are united through the wave like processes of vibration, for the understanding of Vibration is the key to utilizing and unlocking the patterns of creation. This is because everything around us and all matter is made of vibration. Behind the appearances of what we see, hear, and perceive are waves of vibration, ranging from gravity, to light, to electromagnetism. Vibration creates an endless array of forms, shapes and structures that all interconnect in the web of life. Every living thing exists in this web of intricate inter relationship, from the elements, molecules, and DNA, to the stuff that stars are made of, vibrating in patterns that form the basis of our perceived reality, guiding our thoughts, emotions and senses.
Mankind has programmed and projected its own vibratory patterns onto the structures and systems of its emotional and mental landscape, in everything from computer programs, architecture and media, to relationships and addictive behaviour. These patterns of vibration are what lie behind every form, be it a table, a human or a building, creating what we see, hear, think and feel as interpreted by our brains into different visual, audio or tactile sensations. All these perceptions and patterns are a work in continual and unending progress, in the apparently never ending creation of new forms, ideas and concepts, and the destruction of old ones. In these processes of
work, overcoming resistance, and continuous change, modern scientists like Buckminster Fuller have arrived at the conclusion that all matter, visible or invisible, is a perfect sphere in shape, and that all vibrations, all the spheres of material things, are like radio waves expanding on a fixed wave length into the fluid weightlessness of space. Here, the appearance of matter is nothing but a wave, its vibratory rate slowed down by our senses to resemble static form.
From this picture, we can see that every sound (or every material object for that matter) can be translated in a variety of ways, from a vibratory wave signature, to its shape and numerical properties, to its molecular, electron and subatomic structures. Every sound, from its composition of various light frequencies which we register as colour, to its breakdown into the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and space; to its signature wave pattern; to the numerous thoughts, pictures, and sensations a “sound object” may evoke for the individual based on their personal, cultural or conditioned history; all are different modes of communicating information as different aspects of vibration. Hence, vibration also implies language to structure it, differing forms of language described in sound, geometry, meaning and perception. Perception creates realities based on meaning and belief systems, many of which are hidden in the unconscious, beyond the surface awareness. Hence, exploring these underlying movements of vibration in all its modes is the game and play of all appearance, all time, and all life.
Each of the fourteen classes of sound in the Maheshwara Sutra, depict these underlying, subtle movements in sequential order. Each class of sound and each chapter are unique in themselves, requiring a cross disciplinary approach. Different sutras cover the whole gamut of human expression, from sound and cross cultural linguistics, to quantum physics, music, cymatics, geometry and neuro science, all underpinned by a spiritual science of consciousness that has been tested, formulated, and verified by the greatest minds, and hearts, of Vedic India. All together, they form a twenty-first century view of consciousness, merging ancient wisdom with modern, cutting edge science.
All in all, the sutras collectively paint a picture of the harmonious unfolding of vibration and meaning through the various forms and functions of the creative process, right from the beginning of creation in the unseen realms, to the formation of our sense organs creating the appearance of our three dimensional reality. As such, it is a profoundly realigning, and healing process. Hence the sounds of the Maheshwara Sutras are understood to be inherent in the natural order and structure of life itself.
[1] Nandikeshvaras commentary on Maheshwara Sutra, translated by Peter Harrisson.
[2] A machine that visually records the shape of sound in the science known as Cymatics.
[3] F David Peat
