Gāyatrī

When nothing is felt, the mind has not gone anywhere. It has stopped. This verse asks for exactly one thing, that it be set moving, and so it is the japa for numbness here. On that path it is the breath and the word at once, the way it is said in sandhyā.

It is not a request for anything to be given. Read it closely and it asks for one thing only: that the understanding be set in motion. धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात्. May he set our thinking going.

That is an unusual thing to ask for, and it is exactly what a man in this training needs. Dependence does not take away a man's intelligence. It stops it moving. He can still see what is happening to him, often more clearly than anybody around him, and he cannot move from the seeing to the doing. The gap between the two is where the whole illness lives.

So of everything that could be asked for, this verse asks for movement in the one faculty that has seized. And it asks the sun, which has never once failed to move.

The complications it serves: The mouth and the teeth · The long grey · Attention and memory

वाचिक: Said out loud, at the length of one out-breath. The syllables light as you say them. उपांशु: The lips move, the breath carries it, nobody across the room can hear it. The light goes through each line in its colour, as it does aloud. मानस: Nothing is said. The words grow faint, the light still goes through them, and their sense stays, with the breath and the beads. अन्तर्यात्रा: One mālā that goes inwards by itself. The first third aloud, the second in a whisper, the last in the mind. The voice leaves the room without you deciding when.