While reading Shri Aurobindo's Secret of Vedas and also parallelly listening to Rajiv Malhotra's audible book Being different, I happened to realize a very interesting thing.
When understanding the Vedic hymns and associated mantras, it came as a revelation to me that how profound their genesis is. Since I was young, I was always told to join a shloka class or diligently perform my Sandhyavandanam rituals. I don't think I was in the age or had the right maturity then to understand the importance of these aspects of life.
Shri Aurobindo explain that mantra didn't evolve through a scholarly process, they were uttered when the ancient seers, the progenitors of Vedas where in a state of deep interaction with nature through mediation. The way they perceived sensations of nature including the five elements and also the living and non-living things made them utter the root syllables of the observations. e.g. When a seer explained a wolf, the Sanskrit for the same is Vikra, which is associated with the root of tearing apart. This is also differing from the western construct of many objects like fire. In west an object or a thing is just described in a word, but in Ancient India they were explained as experience e.g. there was a hymn to Agni or Hymn to the Sun (Aditya Hridayam) .
Further elaborate on below
- Word associations from ordinal to secondary
- How when words are told it cause neural sensations, which is why shraap used to hurt individuals in ancient times.
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