Debashish Banerji, PhD, is is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is author of Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century.

In this video, recorded in 2015, he describes the Indo-European family of languages and the relationship between Sanskrit and other languages of Europe and Asia. In India, Sanskrit developed a unique life as a language used in ritual and as a language for the sacred texts of the Vedanta tradition. Sanskrit became a language for contemplation. The very sounds of the language were thought to have the power of altering consciousness. Of particular interest is the mantra, AUM. It is considered to be the primordial sound of the universe that, when repeated, gives access to the entire spectrum of consciousness.

(Recorded on December 19, 2015)

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Published on April 9, 2026