13 ways of looking at my guru. #12: Sarasvati-Isis-Mary-Sophia

"AI represents Sarasvati. The nasalization means the removing of pain. This is the seed-utterance of Sarasvati. With it the Word is worshipped."--Varada Tantra

"...we understand human individuality outside the physical body and know how it must be immediately taken up outside the physical body into the bosom of the beings of the higher hierarchies, so that it does not become destructive or lethal to our own being on the physical plane. And the feeling of the human soul resting in the bosom of a being of the higher hierarchies will become real, infinitely real. Then, for the first time, we will know how it looks beyond death. We will know that there on Earth we are surrounded by the mineral kingdom, the plant, animal, and human kingdoms. Beyond death we enter into the bosom of the higher hierarchies, to whose environment we belong, as here we belong to the environment of the physical beings that surround us. A certain feeling of communality with the beings of the higher hierarchies comes into our soul. We can permeate ourselves with this feeling. And we learn properly that a true penetration into the spiritual worlds is not at all possible without bringing with us certain feelings, which can be called religious and pious feelings, feelings of devotion to the higher spiritual world.
The feelings I have just described are so nuanced that they elicit a particular mood in the soul, which I can only express as a mood of resting in the bosom of spiritual beings. This soul mood is needed for any real experience of the spiritual worlds, just as in the physical human world, to be understood by other people, we need to produce an ee sound [as in meek] through the larynx and the other organs of speech. In the higher worlds the soul feeling flowing from devotion brings about what makes it possible to produce an ee sound in ordinary human speech. The experience of this kind of devotion is one of the vowels of the higher worlds. And we can experience nothing, read and hear nothing in the higher worlds if we cannot maintain this soul mood--and then wait for what the beings of the higher worlds have to communicate because we offer them this mood of the soul. From such soul moods, from such a way of meeting the higher worlds, the vowel system of the cosmos is composed.
You may have the feeling that the world surrounds you, but you cannot live in this world with your feeble human powers. You feel that what surrounds you while you live in your human body can be perceived in the shadowy forms of your thoughts and ideas; or, better said, they reflect themselves from inside you. You may also come to feel that you cannot experience these imaginations directly; your protecting angelic being in ordinary life must reduce it. And when you feel all of this inwardly with the necessary tone of inner piety, then you have the ability to perceive one of the vowels of the spiritual world."

--Rudolf Steiner, from the lecture "The Vowels and Consonants of the Spiritual World," given October 5, 1914, in Inner Reading and Inner Hearing, pp.39-40