This mantra is stunning. The ṛṣika (femme poet saint) Vāk Ambhṛṇī who sang this song had so merged with the śakti or energy of the power of truth and the truth of speech that she BECAME the sound of truth. That sound is this song. There is burn in it. There is revelation. There is potency and unsecreting things often kept ‘in caves’ within ourselves.
There are some 400 different ṛṣhis of the ṛg veda; a little over a quarter of them are femme. This mantra appears in the 10th mandala of the Ṛg Veda, 125.1-8.
The realization of truth and the speaking of truth has a sharp, bright, estatic, mournful, rebellious, defiant, and world changing power to it. This is complex, but I think we get it from the get go. Truth has power. But there is a difference between knowing truth and speaking truth. There is a difference again between saying the truth and realizing that you ARE the truth speaking. This gets itchy if you come to realize that what you speak is what you are; your intentions and feelings are not quite the same thing as what you manage to be.
The teaching of the śastras suggests that there are four parts of speech or kinds of language. Those with a trained mind, the bhramins, know this and know it within themselves. Most of us have untrained mind bodies, and we are only ever fluent in the end stage of speech. We can see this and know it, as the Age of Information buzzes us around, the spoken and written word are drowning out deeper language, even beginning to drown themselves. We generally have lost the higher, more subtle tongues. This results in confusion, lack of subtlety, lack of depth, lack of strength, cynicism, and vitriol.
The first three are within our body, hidden in ‘caves’. The teachings also say that speech is the final process of integration or digestion; perfect, refined speech is signal of a person who has gone through their work and can bring the great depth of mental thought (which expresses wisdom), devotional or convictional thought, or harmonizing and ultimately silent language. Hesitating, crude, suppressed and unregulated speech is the natural outcome of a mind still bound to it’s own suffering and caught on the most superficial level of speech.
Imagine, now, that what this shaking one is expressing is an integrity of vision, from paraśakti to kriya. This is the truth, all the way through. This is what the song articulates and as we learn it we start to provoke our own revelation, ownership, and capacity to embody our truth.
Speech has power. We have power. What we do with that power and the journey of finding our voice and choosing how to use it is a long, tender one.
This mantra helps.