Sanskrit Mantra and New Creation: Digital Age Kirtan for Renewal

On a Friday night in November, Wah! gathered a live community through harmonium and voice to explore an ancient teaching wrapped in a very modern crisis. The session opens with technical setup—the familiar fumbling of someone threading digital tools into sacred space—and then settles into the real work: how to sing abundance into being when the systems around us are collapsing and reforming.

The arc of the evening turns on a single observation: Microsoft experienced a global outage that week, but Wah! reframes it not as failure but as message. "They did it to themselves," Wah! says, referring to the software update that disabled connection verification across the platform. "It made all of the connections they made unable to for themselves to verify a secure connection." Rather than despair, the insight becomes dharmic. When old structures fail, when the ground shifts, there is a clearing—a gift disguised as rupture. That space is where Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, prosperity, and renewal, actually works.

Who Is Lakshmi and Why Does She Matter Now?

In classical Hindu teaching, Lakshmi represents far more than money. She embodies the wealth that arises from innovation, from tending a garden over time, from what Wah! calls "lasting sadena"—the discipline of trying again. "She can create something out of nothing," Wah! explains. "She can make a meal out of nothing. She can make clothes with a needle. Like abundance is just like being incredibly who's the who were the incredibles, right?" The reference to *The Incredibles*—a mother so elastic she can stretch to solve any problem, a father who holds his family in new ways—is deliberate. Lakshmi's teaching is that generative power lives not in accumulation but in the capacity to improvise, to tend, to remake.

This is radically different from how abundance gets coded in contemporary culture. Lakshmi is not about hoarding or freezing wealth in place. She is about flow, about the compost that becomes soil that becomes grain. In Wah!'s framework, this is especially urgent now because the old systems—the ones built on false connection, on algorithms designed to verify themselves rather than serve—are tilling their own ground. The chaos is not punishment. It is preparation.

The Mantras: Chandi, Lakshmi Seed Syllables, and the Nava Mantra

Wah! moves through several mantra forms during the gathering. The Chandi mantra appears as the goddess of action and release—the force that escorts waste byproducts out of the system. This distinction matters. When Wah! chats with AI about detox, the AI correctly challenges the language: "There are no toxins. There's only waste byproducts." That precision becomes a teaching. Chandi is for that specific work: not magical purification, but the biological, spiritual fact of digestion and elimination. "That's what Chandi is for. So that's what that cham energy is for. It's for letting the waste byproducts flush out of the system."

The Lakshmi mantras—seed syllables and the nava mantra (the new mantra)—function differently. They are invitations to creation. "The new will not be created for us," Wah! says plainly. "The old will just be collapsing." This is the crux. In a moment of system failure, the temptation is to wait for rescue or to defend the wreckage. Instead, Wah! offers the practice: sing the frequency of the Lakshmi who tills, who innovates, who appears in forms never before attempted on earth. "Are you going to try something new? Heck yeah. You going to do ballroom dancing now? Heck yeah. That's that's what just fell on my plate or kite surfing or gardening or Celtic music or like whatever it happens to be."

The Interstitium of the Heart: Fluidity Over Walls

Midway through the chanting, Wah! introduces a striking anatomical metaphor. "We are creating a fluid network within which to move. You might call it the interstitium of the heart. The interstitial fluid. That which bathes the cells." The interstitium is real physiology—the space between cells where nutrients diffuse and waste moves out. It is a network without hierarchy, a space of flow. To invoke it in relation to the heart is to suggest that authentic community and spiritual gathering are not built on fixed walls but on the capacity to bathe each other in presence, to move fluidly, to let what needs to leave go under the bridge.

This becomes the operating principle for the whole evening. Rather than trying to hold form—the old concert, the old way of being together—the work is to become the space where transformation can move through. Listeners are named as they arrive in the chat (Gabrielle, Cameron of Bloomfield, Coral Rose, Emerald), and each name becomes an acknowledgment, a welcome into the fluid field. "The field is blooming," Wah! sings. "The waves. Oh wow. Walls coming down."

Permission to Create: The Close and the Expansive

One of the most practical teachings arrives almost in passing. Wah! speaks of "giving yourself permission to create the new"—and notes that creation happens in two scales at once. "You create it in this very close uh distance and then the expansible boy they stay at." The close is the intimate spark, the decision made in your own body, in your own bedroom, in your own circle. The expansive is what that seed becomes when tended. Neither comes first. Both are necessary. This is Lakshmi: the goddess who works at the scale of the needle and the cloth, at the scale of grain and field.

The evening unfolds in the register of what Wah! calls "trying something new from a new decision place." The mantras are sung in Sanskrit, a language Wah! acknowledges barely understanding in conventional terms. Yet the message arrives clear: "she's sending this vital information which is the way that we move into the road of the heart. It's like are you going to try something new?"

Beauty as Recognition, Not Achievement

The gathering moves toward close with a song: "You keep saying I'm beautiful. / You keep saying I'm beautiful. / I don't know. But to you I must be. / What I know is when you take the time to show me / I feel so free." The insight is deceptively simple. Beauty is not a quality you possess or achieve. It is what becomes visible when someone takes time to truly see you. This is Lakshmi again—not as a distant goddess of wealth but as the principle of recognition itself, of the abundance that flows when we behold and are beheld.

In the context of a Friday night gathering, where names appear in a chat and are met with Namaste, this teaching carries weight. The digital tools that enabled the Microsoft outage—connection verification protocols, surveillance infrastructure—are inverted here. Instead, Wah! uses the same pipes to offer something their opposite: actual mutual recognition. Not the illusion of connection but the presence that says, "I see you. You are beautiful. I took the time to know it."

Where to go from here

If Lakshmi's teaching resonates, the invitation is straightforward but demanding: stop waiting for permission to create. The old systems will collapse on their own—Microsoft's outage is just one small example of a larger truth. The work is to sing the frequency of what wants to be born, to tend it at the close scale, to trust that the expansive will follow. This is not optimism. It is realism about where we actually are. The bridge is burning behind us. The work now is to build something never before attempted on the earth. That work happens in the songs we sing together, in the names we speak aloud, in the permission we give ourselves to try something completely new.