I am Thou

RA MA DA SA, SA SAY SO HUNG

Recalling several practices of healing self and others that have stayed with me throughout my life, I am so happy to remember the Siri Gaitri healing mantra that calmed my anxiety when recovering from breast cancer surgery in 2011, Now experiencing an autoimmune disease attacking my lungs, I'm calmed again by this beautiful mantra: "Ra Ma Da Sa, Sa Say So Hung."

The first four sounds of the mantra ascend and expand into the Infinite; the second part of the mantra pivots those qualities of the highest and brings them back down, to interweave Earth with Infinity:

RA is the Sun  -- its energy strong, bright, hot, and purifying

MA is the Moon -- a quality of receptivity, coolness, and nurturing

DA is the Earth -- its energy is secure, personal, and the ground of action 

SA is Infinity -- the impersonal cosmos in all its open dimensions and totality

SA -- this repetition is the turning point

SAY -- awareness of a sacred "Thou"

SO (the personal sense of merger and identity) and 

HUNG (the Infinite, vibrating and real) -- "I am Thou"

The True Picture of Reality?

British physicist Stephen Hawking pursued what physicists call a Grand Unified Theory, or a "Theory of Everything." As Hawking put it, "My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe." 

His most important work in physics explored the nature of "singularities," anomalies in the space-time continuum commonly known as "black holes." In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, a book that brought his work to a general audience. 

 

Since publication of his memoir My Brief History and release of the movie "The Theory of Everything," those new to Hawking's story have celebrated the simple fact that he lived so long after being diagnosed with motor neuron disease in his early twenties and given two years to live. Instead, he lived to be 76 years old.

When asked many years later about living with the disease, he told an interviewer he was "happier now . . . Before, I was very bored with life. I drank a fair bit, I guess; I didn't do any work . . . When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have."

My favorite of Hawking's quotes is this one: ". . . the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls . . . saying it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?"