Hi everyone,
I would not say I am at the point yet where I can clearly feel the DM mantras vibrating in the body in particular places, as Yogani says we eventually will. I have, however, long understood some basic ideas about different sounds vibrating in different places. Most obvious to my mind, the “m” sound (bilabial nasal), as appears at the end of “om” and “ayam,” seems naturally to vibrate in the nose, as that is part of the nature of that sound (a “nasal” sound, like “n,” “ng,” etc.). Although we do not say the mantra out loud, I assume that the mind still associates it, on a subtle level, with certain movements or areas of the body, especially in the head, and perhaps thereby causes those areas to subtly vibrate when thinking of the mantra, as the mind also knows the meanings of samyama sutras without our needing to think about meanings?
Related, I was recently trying to feel the differences between the positions of the tongue and throat during different vowel sounds. This was more from an interest in linguistics than Yoga, but it occurred to me that it is quite striking how, at least for a language one has learned since childhood, the mind knows all the subtle changes in position it has to perform to make the many different sounds we make in languages even if the conscious mind would be hard-pressed to say “oh, I move my tongue in this direction to produce the sound ‘e,’ etc.”
I know in Sanskrit that “o” is considered a combination of “a” and “u,” and have heard somewhere that “om” is considered to encompass all the vowels (?) in some level. Certainly I could see how it would resonate from the medulla oblongata up to the nose (“o” starts at the back of the head and “m” ends at the front, in the nose?), and I could see how the end of the sound “ayam” would resonate at the third eye.
Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is, when we speak of a “vibratory” quality of a mantra, we are generally speaking of something that happens at a much subtler level than actually saying the mantra out loud, but it seems like, even though we repeat the mantra silently during DM, it may nonetheless tap into subconscious or usually subconscious knowledge our minds have about different oral cavity movement/positions needed to produce different sounds?
