Chapter 13: The Four Levels of Sound
"The cognoscenti know of the Vak that exists in four forms." Rig Veda 1.164.45
The last chapter described the passage from the lips to the mind as a felt experience: the silence, the struggle, the returning. This chapter steps back and offers you a map. Not a modern map, but one drawn over three thousand years ago by the Vedic seers, refined by the Tantric philosophers of Kashmir, and confirmed by every contemplative tradition that has paid close attention to what happens when the sacred word moves inward.
The map has four territories. They are called the four levels of Vak, the four levels of speech. And they describe not merely how sound works but how consciousness itself is structured, from the densest outer expression to the subtlest inner silence.
The Rig Veda, in one of its most enigmatic verses, declares: "Speech has been measured out in four grades. The wise brahmins who possess insight know them all. Three are hidden in the cave and make no motion. People speak only the fourth grade of speech."
Consider what this means. Of the four levels of speech, ordinary human beings use only the outermost one. The other three are hidden. They exist within us, active and alive, but most people never become conscious of them. The entire journey of the Name, from the first spoken syllable to the final silence, is a journey through these hidden layers. It is not a journey to somewhere new. It is a journey into what was already there.
Vaikhari: The Spoken Word
The first level is Vaikhari. This is the speech you know best. The fully manifest, audible, spoken word. The tongue moves, the vocal cords vibrate, the breath shapes the sound, and the ears receive it. This is the domain of conversation, of prayer spoken aloud, of kirtan and psalm and the calling of the adhan from the minaret.
In the framework of the Tantric philosophers, Vaikhari corresponds to kriya-shakti, the power of action. It is connected to the physical body, to the waking state of consciousness, to everything solid and tangible. When you chant Ram aloud, when the mala turns between your fingers and the sound fills the room, you are in Vaikhari. The Name is in the world. It is public, shared, audible. Others can hear it.
This is where the journey begins for almost everyone. And as we explored in Part II, there is immense power in this beginning. The spoken word engages the whole body. It captures the wandering mind through sensation. It is honest and accessible and requires nothing you do not already have.
But the Vedic seers knew that speech does not begin in the mouth. The mouth is only where it arrives.
Madhyama: The Bridge Between Thought and Sound
The second level is Madhyama. The word means "middle," and it is exactly that. Madhyama is the territory between thought and sound, the place where language has taken shape in the mind but has not yet been spoken. You know this place intimately. When you compose a sentence in your head before saying it aloud, you are in Madhyama. When you "hear" your own thoughts as a kind of inner voice, that is Madhyama.
In the journey of the Name, Madhyama corresponds to mental japa. The Name has left the tongue. It lives now in the mind, held through conscious effort. You "say" Ram inwardly, and you can almost hear it, but there is no sound in the room. This is the territory of the last chapter, the territory of struggle. Because Madhyama is a bridge, and bridges are inherently unstable. You are no longer on solid ground (the body, the voice, the mala) and you have not yet arrived at the subtler shore. You are between.
The Tantric mapping links Madhyama to jnana-shakti, the power of knowledge. It is connected to the subtle body, to the dream state. And there is something dream-like about mental japa, is there not? The thoughts drift. The attention slides. One moment the Name is clear, the next moment you are somewhere else entirely, and the transition happened without your noticing. This is the nature of the subtle body. It moves like water, not like stone.
Gregory of Sinai, writing from the Hesychast tradition, understood this territory well. His instruction to "compress your mind, forcing it down from your brain into your heart" is an instruction to move through Madhyama rather than getting stuck in it. The mind, left to itself in this middle space, will wander endlessly. It needs direction. It needs to be given a destination beyond itself.
Pashyanti: Seeing Speech
The third level is Pashyanti, and here the map enters territory that most modern people will find unfamiliar. The word comes from the root "pash," to see. Pashyanti is "seeing speech." At this level, language is no longer heard, even inwardly. It is seen. It is experienced as a kind of vision, a luminous knowing that has shape and presence but is not composed of words.
The Kashmir Shaivism tradition, particularly the work of Abhinavagupta, describes Pashyanti as the level where there is no difference between the object and the word. At Vaikhari, "Ram" is a sound that refers to something beyond itself. At Madhyama, "Ram" is a thought that points toward a meaning. At Pashyanti, the Name and the Named begin to merge. The word is no longer a label attached to an experience. It is the experience itself.
Pashyanti corresponds to iccha-shakti, the power of will. Not the will you exercise when you force yourself to concentrate, but the deeper will, the creative intention that precedes thought. It is connected to the causal body, to the state of deep sleep. This may seem strange. What does deep sleep have to do with prayer? But the Vedantic teaching is precise: in deep sleep, the mind rests in its source. Thoughts dissolve. The individual personality is temporarily suspended. Pashyanti is a conscious version of this dissolution. The surface mind, with its chatter and distraction, falls away. What remains is a knowing that does not require words.
Ananta describes something that touches this level when he speaks about the prayer "dropping into the heart." "Then the prayer drops into your heart. It is full of fragrance, full of life." Notice the language. Not clarity. Not understanding. Fragrance and life. These are Pashyanti qualities. The Name has ceased to be a mental object and has become a living presence. You do not repeat it. You inhabit it.
We will explore this more fully in Part IV, when the Name enters the heart. For now, it is enough to know that Pashyanti exists as a territory on the map, beyond the mind's chatter, where the Name becomes vision rather than thought.
Para: The Silence That Contains All Sound
The fourth level is Para. Transcendent. Unmanifested. The pure potentiality of sound before it becomes anything at all. At Para, the distinction between speaker, speech, and the object of speech dissolves entirely. There is no mantra, no meditator, no deity. There is only the undifferentiated creative potential from which all sound, all thought, all manifestation emerges.
Para corresponds to the transcendental body and to the state called Turiya, the Fourth, the state beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. It is, in the language of the traditions, the source. The place from which the Name was born and to which the Name returns.
The Kashmir Shaivite practitioners describe the journey of meditation as "tracing speech backward, from Vaikhari to Madhyama to Pashyanti to Para, until the current is felt as spanda itself." Spanda is the primordial creative pulsation of consciousness. It is not a vibration you can hear. It is the vibration that makes hearing possible. To arrive at Para through the practice of the Name is to arrive at the source of the Name, which is the source of all things.
This is the territory of the later chapters of this book, of Parts VI and VII. For now, Para stands at the far end of the map, a reminder that the journey of the Name has a destination beyond the mind entirely.
The Mandukya Key
The Mandukya Upanishad, one of the shortest and most concentrated texts in the Vedantic canon, provides a parallel map that illuminates the four levels of Vak from a different angle.
The Mandukya takes the syllable AUM and maps its three sounds onto three states of consciousness:
"A" corresponds to the waking state. The consciousness that perceives the external world. This is Vaikhari territory. The Name as spoken word, engaging the physical senses.
"U" corresponds to the dream state. The consciousness that perceives the internal world. This is Madhyama. The Name as mental activity, subtler than speech but still possessing form and movement.
"M" corresponds to deep sleep. The consciousness that rests in undifferentiated bliss, aware of nothing in particular yet aware. This is Pashyanti. The Name beyond words, known but not articulated.
And then there is what follows: the silence after the "M" fades. The Mandukya calls this Turiya, the Fourth. It is not a state alongside the other three. It is the ground on which all three rest. It cannot be spoken. It cannot be thought. It cannot be perceived through any sense or grasped by any mental function. It is Para.
The Mandukya states: "With the cessation of all phenomena, even of bliss, this soundless aspect becomes known. It is a state of nondual reality." Notice: even bliss ceases. The deep joy of Pashyanti is not the end. Beyond the joy, there is the silence that contains the joy and everything else.
This mapping, Vaikhari to "A" to Waking, Madhyama to "U" to Dream, Pashyanti to "M" to Deep Sleep, Para to Silence to Turiya, is what one scholar has called "the map of maps." It shows that the journey of the Name through the four levels of sound is identical to the journey of consciousness through the four states of awareness. The Name is not merely a tool for reaching these states. The Name IS these states. At each level, the Name takes the form appropriate to that level. At Para, the Name IS the Self.
Echoes in Other Traditions
The four-level structure is not confined to the Sanskrit-speaking world. Other traditions have mapped the same terrain with different language.
Guru Nanak's Japji Sahib describes five khands, five realms of spiritual progress: Dharam Khand (the realm of duty), Gian Khand (the realm of knowledge), Saram Khand (the realm of effort), Karam Khand (the realm of grace), and Sach Khand (the realm of truth). The progression from outer practice through knowledge and effort to grace and finally to truth mirrors the movement from Vaikhari through Madhyama and Pashyanti to Para. The Sikh tradition teaches that the practice of Nam Simran, the repetition of the divine Name, progresses from verbal to silent to deep listening, until "the Unstruck Sound-current of the Naad resounds." That unstruck sound is the Sikh expression of Para.
Rumi, writing from the Sufi tradition, pointed to the same reversal: "When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues." The hundred tongues are not a multiplication of speech. They are a deepening. At the level of Vaikhari, you have one tongue and it can say one word at a time. At the level of the heart, language breaks open into something richer than any single word could carry. The heart's speech is Pashyanti speech: not verbal, not sequential, but immediate and whole.
These are not borrowed teachings. They are independent arrivals at the same territory. When contemplatives from different centuries and different continents describe the same structure, they are not copying each other. They are reporting on the actual architecture of human consciousness. The four levels of Vak are not a Hindu theory. They are a description of what happens, in any tradition, when a human being takes a sacred word seriously and follows it inward.
Why This Map Matters for You
If you are sitting with the Name in silence and finding the mental japa difficult, the map of Vak tells you something important: you are in Madhyama, and Madhyama is a bridge. Bridges are not meant for living on. They are meant for crossing. The restlessness you feel, the drift, the struggle to hold the Name in the mind for more than a few seconds, these are the characteristics of bridge territory. You are between two shores. The shore of the body (Vaikhari) is behind you. The shore of vision (Pashyanti) is ahead. The crossing takes time, and it takes practice, and it will often feel like you are getting nowhere.
But the map also tells you that you are not getting nowhere. You are in the middle of a real journey. The difficulty is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something is going right. The mind is being asked to do something it was not designed for: to hold a single point of awareness without wandering. That holding, repeated day after day, is not futile repetition. It is the slow, patient work of opening a passage to Pashyanti, where the Name will no longer need to be held because it will hold you.
Ananta says: "Your heart loves to sing praises of God. So that is how the Ajapa Japa can happen." That singing heart is Pashyanti awakening. But it awakens only through the patient, often frustrating work of Madhyama. The bridge must be crossed before the other shore can be reached.
The next chapter will bring you back from the map to the territory itself. It will look, without flinching, at the mind you actually have: the one that wanders, forgets, resists, and returns. It is not the mind you wish you had. It is the mind that will carry the Name to the heart.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Then the prayer drops into your heart. It's full of fragrance, full of life. Prayer drops into our heart."
"Your heart loves to sing praises of God. So that is how the Ajapa Japa can happen."
"Then you will find that your prayer drops into your heart and your heart itself starts praying. Then you're just an observer of the fragrance of this prayer, of the love that emerges from your heart, and then that becomes a constant way of existence."
-- Are You Empty All of the Time or Are You Praying All of the Time?
"When you are praying in this way, or you're contemplating a question of self-inquiry, empty in the head, and you're truly contemplating in your heart, then both are the same because you've come to the right place where your home is, where you belong."
-- Are You Empty All of the Time or Are You Praying All of the Time?