LET’S COMMUNICATE………

So before I am going to talk anything about yoga, let’s discuss about communication so that you
can understand what I mean to say so that we will reduce the chance of communication barrier to
have a better clarity of understanding. As our mean of interaction will be with English language and I
feel personally this language is poor in itself and I am also very poor in it. I know it sounds
controversial, please don’t take me wrong, I am going to explain why I said this statement.
I hope we will have a better interaction so that we will not have any misunderstand between us that
leads to opposition and confrontation.
now a days English is the most common language to interact globally. All the languages have its own
beauty of expression and so does have the English too but now the question is how rich is English to
express?

What is the richness of the language? Having a thick dictionary with millions of words? English
language may have nearly 1 million words. One can say it is rich and may be it is but rich in what?
Objects? materials? The world has become materialistic that means more objects so more words.
objective and materialistic words can be added to any language dictionary but what about the subtle
meaning?

let me make it more clear. for example, the word “you” is used when someone talk to another,
it may be a father to son or a son to father or a friend to another friend. But it is obvious that the
expression of affection a father to his son is different that the son to father and a friend to friend, so
how can a single word express these different levels of affections, respect and emotions? May be
English language has a lot of different expressions but it is not qualitatively as rich as it is
quantitatively.

Now let’s come to our scenario for sufficiency of English for expression of yogic experiences. The
expression of yoga which is truly inexpressible is tried best to express in Sanskrit and when again it is
translated to another language, the depth and weight of the experiences decreases. I think specially
in English there are no words available to express same depth and meaning.

let me clarify it more clearly, for example, the Sanskrit word “NAMASTE”. in English it is simply
translated into the word “HI”. it’s the most common word to greet, but is it the real meaning of the
word NAMASTE? What is the meaning of Namaste? NAMASTE can be classified in two ways.
first, NAMAH + TE.
NAMAH means I bow or I respect to the divinity ,
TE means you.
so the first over all meaning is “ I bow to the divinity in you. ”
Now let’s take the word “ NAMAH “ AGAIN.
NAMAH= NA + MA
NA means NOT
MA means MINE
so NAMA means I leave my ego
now the second overall meaning of NAMASTE is “ I respect you leaving my EGO “.

So now do you think HI is the same English expression of the word NAMASTE?

Unlike English, Sanskrit is a spiritual language so it’s more qualitative than quantitative. like
NAMASTE, there are many spiritual words like prema, bhakti, sharanagati, sadhana, and most of the
Sanskrit words, that doesn’t have equivalent words in English. But I don’t want to teach and preach
something with less qualitative, so I will use the same Sanskrit word and I will try my best to express
its true meaning. If you can’t understand you can ask me and if you are interested to know about my
thoughts on language and Sanskrit, then comment, I will be glad to share.

thanks a lot for reading it patiently, see you in next post.

My soulful NAMSTE.