Guiding Thought

Your joy unifies! Accepting your joy, acknowledging it, sharing it, and expressing it heals you and heals others. To be wholly joyful means to be wholly Love…means to be wholly your Self.

Sharing

The words I use are obviously English-American words. I do this (first) because I am American, and English is my first language. However, a second reason is because I want the ideas, or the concepts, to be accessible to English speakers.

However, there are concepts that I talk about here that are not sufficiently embodied by English. Do you know why Eskimos have 50 different words for “snow”? It’s because they experience that many shades-nuances-subtleties of snow. In English, we use the same word, “snow”, to mean snow on the ground, blowing snow, falling snow, light snow, heavy snow, wet snow, etc. But in Eskimo languages, all of these are different and have their own word. Words symbolize what a culture collectively expresses: snow is very much central to cultures that live in snowy places.

In a similar way, Sanskrit (the ancient language from which many Indic languages have been derived), has words for concepts that are central to the culture from which it came. Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, the oldest literature in the world. The Vedas are (arguably) the most complete work that encompasses all aspects of human existence. Sanskrit has words for concepts that English does not even recognize.

For example: In English, words are composed of letters. There is no meaning to the word letter as applied to the alphabet other than, “a” is a letter; “b” is a letter, etc.  In Sanskrit, the word for letter is akshara. There are 51 aksharas in the Sanskrit alphabet. The akshara that Westerners recognize the most is Om. However, implied in the word akshara there is a concept that the English word letter does not convey: that the sound of each letter is never destroyed. The idea is that when the sound of an akshara is uttered, it remains as vibration infinitely.

Why have I given the mini-linguistic lesson?

I started by explaining why I write in American English—I want this work to be accessible. However, as I write, some of the words I use are much bigger conceptually than the American-English word can convey.

For example:

• The word for Joy in Sanskrit is Ananda.
• One word for God in Sanskrit is Satchitananda, which means existence (Sat), knowledge (chit), and bliss (Ananda).
• When I think about “Your joy unifies”, the joy I am thinking about is not just the joy of life, the joy of a newborn child, or the joy of being with a loved one; I am thinking about THE JOY that unifies, THE JOY that is the Ananda of

When I think about it in this way, the rest of the Guiding Thought falls into place, “To be wholly joyful means to be wholly Love…means to be wholly your Self”, for to be WHOLLY in Satchitananda means to be WHOLLY LOVE, means to be UNITED with your Self.