THE DIVINE KA
For this reason, the Vedic seers equated this sound with the letter ka, the first consonant in the Sanskrit alphabet. First, it should be pointed out that the letters in the Sanskrit alphabet were arranged according to certain phonetic principles, and each letter was assigned a certain degree of openness (vivritta) or closure (sprishta) depending upon how it was produced by the vocal apparatus.
In this system, the letter ka was assigned the maximum degree of closure. This follows from the fact that k represents a full guttural stop. Unless it is associated with a vowel—that is, ka, ki, ku, ke, and so forth—it cannot be pronounced at all. It represents the most constricted form of speech.In the Vedic system of phonetics, the least constricted sound, and therefore the sound associated with the maximum value of openness, was assigned the letter a (pronounced as in father). According to the Agama (Revealed) texts of the tradition, which deal with the meanings of mantras (sonic formulas) and yantras (geometric formulas), the letter a symbolizes the immeasurable self of all the other letters. For this reason, the consonants of the Sanskrit alphabet are typically pronounced by associating them with the vowel a, so that they are pronounced as ka, kha, ga, gha, and so on.
The union of k and a produces ka, which symbolizes the union of the most constricted form of divine speech (k) with the infinite self (a) and represents the smallest wavelength of transcendental sound that can be “heard” by the infinite self. For this reason, the thumb-size soul was called the divine Ka, to whom an entire hymn is devoted in the Rig Veda.
A similar terminology was used in the Egyptian tradition: The inner controller of the human mind and body was also called the Ka, and was often represented by the human body in Egyptian iconography in order to indicate that it was the inner controller of human beings. The more technical hieroglyphic symbol for the Ka, however, was two outstretched arms bent upward at the elbows. The place where the two arms meet represents the heart, where the Ka, the thumb-size soul, is realized. The arms bent at the elbows symbolize the cubit, which is measured on the basis of the digit. The Ka may be viewed as the heart and soul of the cubit.
We can conclude, then, that the thumb-size soul was understood similarly in both the Vedic and Egyptian traditions, and that it was represented in both systems by the same phoneme: ka. We will discover other such linguistic correspondences later.