There are 70 million mantras of Śrī Vidyā. It is not possible or useful to record all of them. We will take up a handful of them and try to understand them in some measure.
First of all, mantras, yantras, and tantras are channels of communication: for us to know about the worlds of Gods and for Gods to respond to us in favorable ways. As such it is not possible to give a precise meaning to mantras. For example, what is the meaning of a particular TV channel? Or again what is the meaning of a pigeonhole for keeping your letters? The meaning is variable; it is the information passing through the channel of communication.
In the morning you may receive or send one program; in the afternoon another, in the night, yet another. Rarely does the program repeat. Still, it is possible to distinguish the type of information that comes through; for example, there could be one channel which broadcasts only music, one only box office movies, yet again, one of your friends may send you love letters, some legal notices, some junk mail like me. It is such a distinction that we are trying to make.
What Is a Mantra?
It is a word or sentence of power. It has a bandwidth, which is smaller for a larger mantra, and larger for a shorter mantra. Single letter mantras have very wide bandwidth; they allow very large categories of information to flow through them.
How Can Words Have Power?
Of course, they have. If someone tells you “I love you” you are in the seventh heaven; if someone rejects you and says “don’t ever see my face again” then you are depressed. What is happening is that these words acquire their power through the intensity of feeling with which they are spoken.
Words that are recognizable derive their power through feeling or intensity. Words that cannot easily be recognized go deeper.
Why Are Mantras Composed of Seed Letters?
The essence of any seed is information. Take, for instance, the sperm or ovum. It contains information on how to construct a human life form. Since mantras can construct divine life forms, they are constructed out of letters that are seed-like.
If you stop to think how letters were discovered, you will understand that they were imitations of some sound forms which aroused intense feelings in the primordial men. When language was not born, some thinker—probably we should say some “feeler”—meditated for long on the sounds of water flowing over rocks, and the imitation probably became the sound “glauṃ.” It is not surprising that most of the letters have deep anthropomorphic symbolisms, and dealt directly without inhibitions about creation.
Who Constructs Mantras?
Can I construct my own mantra? Yes, you may indeed; but remember, if you try to go by meanings of words as you know them then you are likely to go wrong. They are best when they appear spontaneously in meditation, out of feeling, rather than thought.
In other words, you must see them or hear them spoken, and you are not the real author; you are just a medium for a higher intelligence who is trying to create a communication channel through you with the linguistic or other tools that are available to you at your level of evolution.
If you are a mathematician, you may receive a theorem that is true but you don’t yet know how to prove. These are intuitions given to you when you have pondered over a problem for long and relaxing. It is not a coincidence that discoveries are made in a relaxed state rather than when you are struggling.
You can be a seer of a mantra if you are a regular meditator.
The tantric diagrams are also mantras having a visual form rather than sound form. Śrī Yantra is such a Yantra, seen in meditation. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. This one was worth 70 million channels of communication. So you can imagine the power.
What Is Śrī Yantra?
Śrī Yantra is a geometrical star pattern and lotus pattern through which several divine forces can be marshaled in cooperative and harmonious ways. We see them through it; they see us through it, giving us their qualities.
The Fundamental Śrīvidyā Seed Mantras
Oṃ, Hrīṃ, Śrīṃ, Aiṃ, Klīṃ, Sauḥ
Oṃ is called the praṇava, the unbroken bell-like sound heard as if coming from the heart in the stillness of a tranquil mind. If you listen carefully, you can hear it any time; except for three days before impending death.
As a mantra, it is to be pronounced as an elongated aaaaaaa–uuuuuuu–mmmmmmm, the sound of mmmm continuing to ring afterward merging into silence. The sound of aa is the channel for all waking state experiences; sound of uuuu for all dream states; the sound of mmm for all sleeping states. The ringing continuing sound is the channel for the state of existence where you merge into the infinite light, peace, and power of God, called the transcendent state.
This is the highest mantra, the universal name of God who encompasses all life and beyond.
Hrīṃ, Śrīṃ, Aiṃ, Klīṃ and Sauḥ are called the Śakti Praṇavas, or the modes of manifesting God’s supreme power. The supremacy of divine power is this: it knows all, does all, pervades all space, time, and matter.
Hrīṃ and Śrīṃ: Individuation and Return
Hrīṃ is the power of limiting God’s supreme effulgence, making a limited living form. You may compare it to the power that produces a wave or a drop of foam out of the sea. The wave or drop of consciousness thinks that it is different from the sea that it sees till it falls back into the sea and loses its individuality.
Hrīṃ is the individuating, life-giving, life-affirming channel of making this world that is confined to space, time, and matter. To us earth beings, it streams as Sūrya Kuṇḍalinī from our star the Sun, as the creative power of moods; as Soma Kuṇḍalinī from our planet Moon; and as the lust for life from the bowels of our earth as Agni Kuṇḍalinī, the passions we experience.
Śrīṃ is the opposite of Hrīṃ. What Hrīṃ does, Śrīṃ undoes it. If Hrīṃ creates all this world with the stars, moons, earths, and all life, Śrīṃ makes all these things into the primordial oneness of God.
Hrīṃ makes you small and therefore different from God; Śrīṃ makes you grow into God. Hrīṃ is known as the seed of shyness, of self-covering, of limitation. Śrīṃ is called the grace of God which may appear terrible to you because it takes away all that is familiar to you: your family, friends, this world, even yourself. But it is the Grace that removes your limitedness and makes you GOD.
Oṃ is the whole, the four-dimensional sphere, the golden egg which is sexless and contains in it the seed and full-grown form of the world, the heart of all things, of life. Hrīṃ and Śrīṃ are the two split halves of it. Oṃ is the heart, and Hrīṃ and Śrīṃ are the two breasts of the Divine Mother.
This is how the symbol of Puruṣa, the whole, and Prakṛti, the split halves, come about. The two halves try to complete their incompleteness; and that is the odyssey of life.
Aiṃ, Klīṃ, and Sauḥ: Knowledge, Nourishment, and Dissolution
Aiṃ, Klīṃ, and Sauḥ are channels for manifesting, sustaining, and dissolving the world, all working under the control of Hrīṃ.
The nature of Aiṃ is seed, whose essence is knowledge. Hence the Goddess Sarasvatī is located in the face.
Klīṃ nourishes the world like a mother nourishes her child with milk from her breasts. So the seat of this channel is the heart, the seat of universal love that nourishes this world. This power is known as Lakṣmī, the wealth of God.
Sauḥ is the power of action that leads to escape from the cage of body, mind, and thought. It is known as Kuṇḍalinī, the power of action. It dissolves the world of sensations and limited experiences and takes you back to the source, God. It eliminates step by step the powers of smell, taste, form, touch, and sound; finally, it eliminates time itself.
It takes you to the state of Hiraṇya Garbha, the golden egg of the four-dimensional sphere, and collapses it to a point. It starts in the body as a pleasant sensation similar to an orgasmic release of tensions, allowing you to experience a glorious climax of a festival of galaxies.
Its seat is supposed to be in the clitoris called the Kumara, the little, all-powerful son of Śiva, the liṅga, the essential maleness embodied in a liṅga, the penis.
Mantra, Sexual Energy, and Kuṇḍalinī
Aiṃ is the mantra resident on the tip of the tongue. Klīṃ resides in the nipples. Sauḥ, the Śakti, also called Parvatī, Durgā, Bālā Tripura Sundarī, Gaurī, resides in the womb.
Glauṃ is the sound of water flowing over pebbles in a small brook, overcoming and negotiating difficulties or hardships. There is a very humorous cosmic intelligence presiding over this transformation called Mahāgaṇapati. He resides at the entrance to the womb, preventing penetration, watching over the procreative act and the creative giving of a life form.
Sauḥ is a sound of a hissing snake; it brings about an upward movement of Kuṇḍalinī. Sauṃ preserves sexual tension and circulates it. Kumara, also known as Kārtikeya or Subrahmaṇya, is Śanmukha, the six-faced one: the five senses and the mind.
Neither Gaṇapati nor Kumara can procreate. They are Brahmacārins, yet epitomes of bliss. For a Gṛhastha, Brahmacarya means not releasing sexual tension physically but sublimating it upward, opening the third eye.
Haṃsaḥ, So’ham, and Gāyatrī
So’ham and Haṃsaḥ are the mantras of the union of Śiva and Śakti, of cosmic intercourse of yourself with the world. Ha is the sound of breathing out; Sa is the sound of breathing in. Between them is the bindu, the mind, the life.
These are unconsciously recited by every breathing life form. They are esoteric forms of the Gāyatrī Mantra.
Prakaṭa Gāyatrī is the familiar Vedic form. Gupta Gāyatrī is given through initiation in the Śrīvidyā tradition and is known as Pañcadaśī, the fifteen-lettered mantra beginning with Ka.
When you breathe out, your life merges with the world; when you breathe in, it returns to you. Thus you die and are reborn with every breath.
The Śiva Sūtras and the Origin of Language
If you wish to know more about the science of mantras, you must study the Śiva Sūtras. At the end of His cosmic dance, Śiva sounded his drum fourteen times. These drum beats became the letter sequences of the Sanskrit alphabet, the foundation of Yoga, Grammar, Dance, Literature, and Music.
