Vac Siddhi
In Hindu mysticism, a siddhi
is an occult power gained through yogic discipline. Bilocation,
telepathy, and clairvoyance are among the Siddhis advanced
practitioners are said to be capable of achieving. The Vac Siddhi is
the
occult power of having everything you say become true. Vac is Sanscrit for speech, related to our vocal, vocation, (vacuum?).
While the methods by which one may attain to the other Siddhis are
obscure, and presumably involve arduous ascetic contortions, the Vac
Siddhi can be achieved simply by observing a scrupulous adherence to
the exact truth. If you never speak anything but the exact truth,
eventually, everything you say will become true.
Speaking the
precise truth about any given matter can be difficult, even if no
prevarication is intended, so attaining the full form of this Siddhi is
difficult. Yet its beginning rootlets can be observed everywhere around
us in our daily lives. The word of an honest person carries a certain
weight, and projects an influence not found in the utterances of
habitual prevaricators. A sort of general degradation of reality can be
observed in the lives of liars and dissemblers. The filaments
connecting thought to reality, and word to deed, here become decayed,
tenuous, atrophied and frail. Weak and dusty webs of words drift
uselessly in the lives of liars, and no power adheres to their empty
dictates. At last, everything around them falls to bits, and is swept
away by a wind.
By contrast, the word of a scrupulously honest
person, one who speaks carefully and with deliberate intent, is not
merely a word, but a new projection from a weighty and buttressed
pre-existing structure of truth. I would rather have a thousand
flamboyant curses tossed at me by a liar, than endure a single
malediction from an honest man. Yet even the words of liars carry some
weight, such is the inherent power of speech itself.
In certain
cultures, lying, and even extravagant displays of falsehood, are
considered normal and basic parts of daily life. I think it is no
coincidence that these lands remain chronically impoverished. Moving
around in a country where no real opprobrium adheres to lying, even of
the most ludicrous, childish and patently transparent sort, is a sort
of phantastic and dreamlike experience. A vendor will hold a moldy,
shriveled vegetable before your face, crying out "Look, no rotten!
Veeeery fresh! Veeeery good!" A shop-owner will attach himself to your
sleeve and tug you into his shop, all the while saying "No hassle! No
bother! Why you not come my shop? You don't like Egyptian people?" In
India, if you ask when the train is coming, you will invariably receive
the answer "O, very soon!" even if (as cannot but be the case) they
have no idea when the train will arrive. They are just being polite.
This endemic, chronic lying seems to create a pervasive and inescapable
atmosphere of general shoddiness, degradation, and occasionally comical
incompetence. Life itself is cheapened. This degradation even seems to
extend to physical goods, which are almost inevitably flimsy and
defective. Whole nations are inextricably bogged down in swamps of
prevarication. Their efforts at constructive improvement inevitably
fall to pieces, being bound together only by shoddy, dreamlike
ligaments. No hard rivets of veridicality nail together their
structures, physical or mental.
By contrast, when I lived in a
remote and poor rural area of China, I found the physical goods to be
characterized by a certain basic solidity, despite the poverty of the
surroundings. And not surprisingly, the inhabitants would generally
tell you the truth about anything, even to an extent that would seem
brutal and unkind in our culture. "O, you are too fat! You must walk up
the mountain every day!" "O, you are not very good at that are you?
Hahaha!, ok!" These types of statement contained no malevolent intent
whatever, but were simple observations of the truth everyone could
already see.
These experiences convinced me that the linkages
between speech and reality are quite direct, although invisible.
The Vac Siddhi embodies a deep operative principle of our reality.
Those who speak truth, make truth. A word is not merely a sound, or
even an idea, but an active force, having something of its own
autonomous and living nature. Those who know this secret, and use it,
are the true sorcerers, and their words are spells and incantations
that can form reality.