Is the word Rama then eternal? The combination of ‘Ra’ with ‘ma’ which makes the word Rama, you will remember, creates a new entity. ‘Ra’ and ‘ma’ together is not ‘Ra’ plus ‘ma’ but is in fact beyond both sounds, hence it becomes a word. And so when you can pronounce the word correctly, and say Rama, you create a vibration which when it dies in the hearer (we have not yet come to the reader) you have another person who experiences the sound at the end of which experience he should know Rama in the way you wanted Rama understood. So that Rama must mean the same thing to you and to him and as such Rama has to be of an unchanging nature. Thus a vibration or a series of vibrations must mean at all times the same thing, for otherwise you would not have used it, and the hearer would not understand it as such. This comes to mean finally that he who says the word enunciates the word, and he who hears it has to have the eternal part awakened in him so that there could be right communication. If the transient speaks to the transient it becomes a cacophony. But if the eternal, the unchanging, speaks to the unchanging, in me, in you, we have one language.

Now, some languages have history and according to some all languages have history. It would be better to say just as Indian civilization is the making of the rishis (the sages) and the Western, of heroes and prophets, that some languages seem to have this breath of eternity in them and have attained then the status of what Albert Einstein called ‘the language of the gods’, others are mere vernaculars.

The Sanskrit language is such a ‘language of the gods’ and through Sanskrit all Indo-European languages participate in this, including the much abused, in India, English language. After all, remember, Shakespeare used the English language.

Therefore my argument is, unless you, the writer, could go back to the changeless in yourself, you could not truly communicate with the reader, if at that level the reader exists truly, then the question ‘who speaks to whom?’ would not arise at all.

There is considerable talk in the world of ‘communication’: At the UNESCO there is a special department devoted to the so-called subject of communication. It is my conviction (basing myself on my Indian background) that you cannot really communicate unless you have no desire to really communicate.

Mauna vyakhya prakatita parabrahma tatvam, silence, the illuminator of the Supreme Brahma’s essence.

Unless the author becomes an upasaka and enjoys himself in himself (which is rasa) the eternality of the sound (sabda) will not manifest itself, and so you cannot communicate either—and so the word here becomes nothing but a cacophony.