| CHAPTER
13
Mantra
NO
EASTERN PRACTICE
aroused my Western skepticism so strongly as the theory of mantra. The
notion that certain words had power and could affect our mind/brain
and even our relation to the world smacked of mumbo jumbo to the extreme,
bordering on magic incantation. I could see how repeating some phrase
harnesses roofbrain chatter and links it with a kind of autosuggestion.
Salesmen keep slogans on their mirrors, dashboards of their car, and
so on, affirming: “I am confident, buoyant, happy, and irresistible.
I will sell a million dollars worth today.” Their “mantra”
seems to promote a positive stance; they tend to become the slogan they
behold.
Sounds, vibrations, electromagnetic fields, can influence the brain.
My friend Robert Monroe has developed binaural beats of varying types
which, heard through earphones, affect brain-wave coherence. He calls
the effect “hemi-sync” - for hemispheric synchronization.
I have watched wave-tracings as a “trainee” relaxes and
listens to one of Bob’s gateway tapes. Synchronization takes place
within a few minutes, a single slow pulse takes over, and a different
perceptual ballgame often opens at that point.
Bob suspects that earphones have some influence on the brain because
of the magnetic field they set up. For instance, his own extraordinary
out-of-body experiences, which lasted for years, followed an attempt
to perfect a sleep-learning device. He was his own subject and for months
slept with earphones attached, trying various ways to teach the sleeping
brain. His efforts were futile (the brain doesn’t seem to learn
that way), but he had, after that, the unexpected phenomenon of spontaneous
out-of-body experiences; he slipped from the physical to subtle state
at the slightest relaxation, and generally in spite of himself.
When we look at the brain from the holonomic model, Monroe’s experience
and the theory of mantra make more sense. We know the brain operates
through electrochemical actions, but wavevibrations are at the base
of even that activity. Since the brain constructs its world-view by
an interweaving and relating of energy vibrations, any vibration must
have some kind of effect, and some more than others.
For several decades the French physician, Alfred Tomatis, has studied,
at his research institute, the effects of sound on us humans. Tomatis
considers the hearing-listening mechanism the “primary organ of
our emerging consciousness.” He has been particularly interested
in the effect of chanting on the body: why, for instance, Benedictine
monks need only three hours sleep a night so long as they chant six
to eight hours a day. Gregorian chant, like Eastern chant, springs from
sources that were ancient before the Christian Era. Over thousands of
years, Tomatis asserts, man developed a form of vocalization which had
maximum benefits for the mind and body.
Tomatis speaks of “discharge sounds,” which tend to fatigue,
and “charge sounds,” which give tone, health, and peace
of mind. Sound proves one of the major sources of brain stimulus by
which dynamic mental vitality is maintained. Vocal sounds directly resonate
through the skull, chest, and body. Our personally produced resonances
can charge and revitalize our body and brain. Tomatis points out that
the ear is our instrument of balance, but he refers to far more than
just our alignment with the Earth and gravity. Balance means the tonus
of the body; it means gestures, the nonverbal language of the whole
environment, the spatial dynamic “on top of which we can superimpose
vision.” Tomatis considers the skin a “piece of differentiated
ear” and the whole body, its joints, muscles, spine, bones - everything
used to maintain balance in gravity - is tied to the vestibular labyrinth
that keeps all in balance.
Most chants come within the band width for charging the brain, according
to Tomatis. Further, in order to follow the tradition underlying all
chants, one’s breathing must slow enormously, and a marked control
of sound production be developed in order to sustain the long, slow-paced
rhythms. This “slowest possible breathing is a sort of respiratory
yoga... the subject must be in a state of absolute tranquillity in order
to do it.”
Mantra repetition, as practiced in Siddha meditation, uses both this
vocal-change form and an inner, silent form that maintains, in effect,
the outer vocal form. Either way, it is a form of singing and, for some
reason, produces euphoria, calms the system, and brings coherence in
place of discord.
Many of the Earth’s creatures sing in some fashion. I have always
loved Carpenter’s account of the large gibbons of Thailand who,
as a group, climb to the treetop every daybreak and sing, in unison,
a clearly marked octave-scale tune. At sunrise, the climax of the morning
chant is reached, the gibbons “trill” on their highest note,
their bodies go into ecstatic quivering, and then they subside into
a profound peace and quiet.
The “songs” of the humpback whales are astonishing in scope
and richness and remind me of antiphonal chant. Research into the great-brained
creatures of the sea show that they live in a world of sounds. We tend
to interpret other creature’s sounds as forms of economic communication,
territorial declaratives, and so on, which may be shortsighted of us.
Most animal sounds are probably forms of singing and ecstatic gestures.
If the song serves other functions, that may be part of nature’s
economy.
In the creation theories of Shaivism, sound is the first expression
of reality-formation. Sound appears as an explosive burst, with matter
and light secondary aspects. That primordial sound is eternally present
in the creation, according to Shaivism, since the creation is sustained
by that sound. This creation takes place for each of us as our own brain
develops, and we can replicate the creation through its sound, the mantra
Om (oh-mm). That is, yogic theory says Om is the first
creative sound itself, and the sustaining sound of creation. When we
make the sound, our sound and that primal sound cohere, resonate-which
is to say, we become one with that basic creative power since both sound
and its creation are “enfolded” within our mind/brain. To
say that we can “unfold” power through sound is thus not
quite so illogical.
I didn’t care for the recent “big-bang” theory of
creation the cosmologists came up with. I much preferred Fred Hoyle's
more elegant steady-state theory, but my aesthetics seemed to be outweighted.
The big-bang group claims that there is a basic vibration in the universe,
a constant background sound picked up on all the radio telescopes, which
they believe is the sound of the initial universal explosion itself,
still reverberating throughout the cosmos. So on this one point our
hypothesizing cosmologists and those ancient Yogi explorers of the inner
world have a common ground.
Yogic philosophy states that if we explore deeply enough the vast inner
depths of mind we arrive at the outermost reaches of space. The outer
is contained within the inner, rather than the commonsense appearance
to the contrary. If we go through the “four bodies” (already
mentioned), each correspondingly smaller, we will reach the heart of
creation, the hindu or blue pearl, a point of reference, rather than
place or thing, from which all creation radiates out.
So the thrust of Siddha practice is to get to that central point in
the most direct way, immediately within one’s own mind/brain.
From that point the whole outer universe is available for the same direct,
personal interaction (which is not quite the case with radio telescopes
or space probes). One way for arriving at this central point within
is through the mantra. When we repeat the primordial sound, we link
our brain with the consciousness and insight of the creation itself,
and bring our mind/brain into resonance with the whole.
The sound Om gives rise to the sound Hamsa. Ham
is considered by yogic tradition the sound the life-force makes when
entering us on our inbreath; sa is the sound it makes on the
outbreath. Where they merge they form the primal sound Om.
This takes place all the time, at every breath, according to yogic theory.
All we need do is become aware of it by practicing it consciously. Our
outer attention will finally merge with the inner mechanism. When resonance
finally occurs we sense the creative first-sound at each breath and
move into alignment with the universal process; we become aware of our
unity with God. Each breath is then recognized as inspiration in its
original sense, breathing in the Spirit.
The Sanskrit meaning for Hamsa, “I am That,” or “I
am God,” makes sense within this understanding, and we see that
the sound the radio telescopes pick up, that constant background vibration
heard from the cosmos, is, according to Eastern tradition, the very
word: “I am God.” (And I, for one, think that’s neat.)
The practice of Hamsa meditation is coupled with Hamsa
japa - the constant inner repetition of the word. We try (and it
takes real effort and will) to remember to say Ham on every
inbreath and sa on the outbreath throughout the day, regardless
of what we are doing. That is, we try to carry over our meditation into
every second of our mundane worldly life. Finally, we become aware of
ham and sa even while talking aloud, reading, figuring,
working, or whatever. The result is alertness (we are in tune with everything),
tranquility (we are at unity with everything), and centeredness (all
is enfolded within our own particular little skull and heart so we don’t
need a criterion based on outside sources, we aren’t pulled offcenter
into eccentricity).
You might assume that just any phrase would work, but this is not the
case. A true mantra is “charged,” alive, because it has
been handed down for centuries, and it has been handed down because
it is alive. A certain “archetypal” energy might
result from ages of use: the passion, intensity, and will of millennia
of Yogis might in itself create a subtle energy connected with the mantra.
Perhaps all that subtle power gets enfolded in the name and unfolds
for us in our practice. At any rate, true mantras are of consciousness,
not of surface thought and semantic fabrications. A supposed private,
individual mantra, made for each of us, can only contribute to our self-generative
and isolated ego position, which is hardly what the Siddhas had in mind.
Part of the power of the Siddha lineage is through the mantra, which
is passed from Guru to Guru and so remains charged and alive. When we
repeat such a mantra, we evoke the investment of that lineage from its
holonomic enfolding.
Om Namah Shivaya is another variation of the primordial sound.
It means “I bow to Shiva,” the God within my heart. Not
only does this resonate with the primordial power, it establishes our
alignment; we acknowledge the hierarchy of mind/brain; we acknowledge
that our surface-level ego and its verbal thought is an instrument of
that primordial principle. This involves a certain surrender of ordinary
enculturated ego-dominance, but brings about the harmony of alignment,
in place of isolation and anxiety. Such alignment takes time to unfold
fully because resonance with the primordial principle means resonance
with the universal creative power. It takes power to handle or synchronize
with power, and power is developmental like everything else.
The mantra is universal, not sectarian. I close my lectures and workshops
with five minutes of Om Namah Shivaya chanting followed by
a five-minute silent meditation on it. Conservative “Calvinist”
audiences, Roman Catholics, urban-sophisticate agnostics, all are moved
by the mantra. Recently I received a letter from a dentist who heard
me speak at a college. He followed my arguments on childbirth, rearing,
development, and so on, well enough, but resented ten minutes spent
with mantra-repetition. He was convinced it stultified the mind, though
he found that mantra occupying his mind during his long drive home that
night.
He knew I was giving another lecture the next evening, some fifty miles
from where I gave the first. He made out a list of questions for me,
which were, actually, calling me to task for my fall from logical grace.
He intended confronting me with this list after my lecture. He followed
the arguments even better the second time, so, rather diffidently, went
ahead with the mantra at the end. Immediately when the mantra began,
he felt a great weight pressing down on his head and shoulders. This
lasted throughout the five minutes of singing. When the lights dimmed
and silent meditation on the mantra began, that great weight suddenly
lifted and he floated free into a space or state of awareness he had
never experienced before. (He found himself, of course, in the state
of meditation.) When he
came out of the meditation he quietly left the hall. His list of questions
seemed pointless. Something had happened that was beyond all argument.
The mantra had carried him into resonance, and things were changed.
Most mantra stories (and they are legion) are improbable to uninitiated
ears. A meditator from New York City tells of an obscene phone call
she received one day. She picked up the receiver, said hello, and was
caught off-guard by a barrage of obscenities. She was stunned but heard
herself say: Om Namah Shivaya. The voice at the other end stopped;
a moment’s silence ensued, then the caller said, “What was
that, lady?” She repeated the mantra. “Say that again,”
the voice demanded. She obliged and the caller hung up. An hour later
the phone rang again: “Lady,” the same man asked, “What
were those words again?” She told him, he thanked her, and hung
up. The next day he called again and asked: “Lady, where did you
get those words? They've been going over and over in my head ever since,
and I've never felt so great in my life!”
Since the power of the mantra is said to be the actual power of the
creative process itself, and our brain is a hologram of the larger hologram,
the coherence of mind/brain and body which mantra brings can extend
to the physical world itself. Princeton University (and Siddha) student
Mark Kennedy was camping in Hawaii with a friend. They found a particularly
beautiful beach between two mountain ridges jutting out like an open
V into the sea. The beach was deserted and inviting. They didn’t
know it was deserted because the configuration of high mountains formed,
in storms, a vortex effect that created monstrously destructive winds
and waves at that spot. They pitched their tent far out on the sands,
near the surf. In the middle of the night, the grandfather of all storms
broke, the roar deafening. They sat up and began chanting the mantra,
Om Namah Shivaya. (There wasn’t much else to do.) The
winds were tremendous and they heard waves crashing on all sides, but
their tent held, somehow. The storm subsided at dawn and they crawled
out to survey their situation. The waves had obliterated the beach all
around them, leaving intact about a thirty-foot island of sand, in the
middle of which sat their intact tent. The water subsided and they left
the area.
Ron Friedland is a corporation lawyer from Chicago and Muktananda’s
“right-hand man” in America. (He is president of Siddha
Yoga Foundation in this country.) While Baba was in Miami Beach, Ron,
an avid pilot, ordered a new twin-engine craft supposedly of the finest
engineering. With his mother, he was going to fly by commercial transport
down to San Juan, Puerto Rico, pick up the new plane, and fly it to
Miami. Muktananda urged Ron to let some pilot bring the plane up; Ron
insisted that he had the plane thoroughly researched, it was tops in
its field, absolutely safe, and he wanted very much to fly it himself.
Baba insisted he didn’t like that particular plane, but finally
said “All right, but don’t forget the mantra.”
Three hundred and sixty miles out of San Juan, over the Atlantic, Ron
approached cruising altitude, felt a thump, looked out and saw that
his right wing had crimped, its shape distorted, the aluminum skin popping,
as the right motor sputtered and died. The plane, with its crippled
wing and dead engine, spun out of control. Ron began a serious battle
to right the craft, his mother began a serious mantra repetition. Ron
brought the plane into some semblance of balance, opted for a return
to San Juan, and managed the course reversal, battling his controls
each instant to stay aloft. He joined the mantra and began to prime
the dead engine in hopes of getting it started. Suddenly it roared to
life and immediately the plane was more manageable. They flew the three
hundred and sixty miles back and landed, at which point the right engine
quit again.
The mechanic was puzzled. The pressure-relief valve, which compensates
for the difference of gas-tank pressure at high altitudes, had failed.
The wing tank had exploded, thrown gasoline everywhere, all over the
right engine and wing. By all rights, the plane should have burst into
flame. Further, loss of the gas, and the general damage, made operation
of that right engine improbable, to say nothing of flying with so seriously
crippled a wing. Yet they had flown in with both engines operating.
On every count, he said, Ron shouldn’t be there. The plane shouldn’t
have flown, the engine shouldn’t have run; they should have gone
down in flames.
For myself, repetition of Om Namah Shivaya gives calmness in crisis,
a peculiar conviction that all is well in spite of outward appearance,
and an alert euphoria. Coming back from a seminar recently, our 727
hit the grandaddy of thunderstorms, the giant plane tossed like a leaf,
our bellies pitched from ceiling to floor, people tossed their cookies,
children cried, the man opposite me had a noisy heart attack followed
by stroke and paralysis (they had to stretcher him off later).
Ordinarily my heart would have leaped to my throat and I would have
joined my neighbor in a coronary. Instead, the mantra leaped up from
my heart, singing. I went with the mantra and found myself simply processing
information. An alert responsiveness swept me; every facet of the scene
around me was noted in a neutral state free of fear. Not that I felt
safe; “safe” indicates outcome, something of the future
injected into the scene. I was processing present information only,
without the distortion of imaginings about a future that didn’t
exist.
This is not to suggest that we employ the mantra as a clever trick to
outwit nature or the world of folly. The power of the mantra is not
available to our employment but offers us employment in its power. At
the instant of the mantra’s springing up, there is a fractional
second of choice, perhaps similar to Castaneda’s cubic centimeter
of chance. We can go with the mantra within or with the world without.
Perhaps we prepare for this instant choice by our continual saying of
the mantra to ourself. We get ready for those rare instances (rare in
the beginning of our learning) when the mantra leaps up of itself to
bail us out of some difficulty. The Gospels admonish us to “Be
alert--for you never know at what instant He is coming.”
The instantaneous decision we must make is made entirely by our will;
it tests the keen edge of our real ability. We can’t rationally
think over the issue, weigh the evidence, and opt for the most likely
winner. Reason is light-years too slow for this split moment.
The mantra, which is my true Self, leaps up at that instant when I am
about to lose myself to some situation; when I am about to fall into
the world; when my ancient flight-fight syndrome is about to take over
and lock my brain and senses into some outer stimuli supposedly threatening
my well-being. If I say no to the mantra and yes to instinct I am lost
in my physical senses and shut off from the power of consciousness within
me, the only power for real change available. Then all I can do is pit
my weak physical energy and weak emergent thought, made of its samskaras,
against the far greater power of nature or my social world. Immediately,
I am subject to the mechanics of that all-too-mechanical process, an
arena of combat in which we all, sooner or later, always lose.
When our will has the ability to say yes to the mantra, though, we align
with its power. Our brain is brought into resonance; it goes into balance
between inner power and outer expression, and processes data without
interpretation or value-which means it operates free of samskaras. Then
outer stimuli feed directly into the power of consciousness and the
creative circuitry of mind/brain can operate as a unit. Since consciousness
is powering the outer world by projection through the brain anyway,
the balanced brain simply allows for a balanced picture to form. When
our brain is brought to balance by the mantra we are again at the center
of the system, as designed. We have become ego-centric again. We have
become again as a little child. The mantra is matrix.
We are then aligned with our Self, a person and world in balance. We
are a unified whole which can’t, because of its very nature, divide
against itself. (The house divided against itself must surely fall.)
The Self can’t act against itself and, at the moment of balance
(I believe) nothing inappropriate can occur. But -and this
is the critical qualification - such results are peripheral, after-the-fact,
incidental to and never parts of the computation of the moment of unity.
This moment of unity is true concrete operational thinking. This is
the way the Ceylonese walk fire without harm, or run skewers through
their cheeks without blood or pain. This is the way the Guru protects
us if we can accept that protection. This is why Jesus of the fourth
Gospel promised total invulnerability to his followers. And this is
what, in our pitiful state of fracture we have dimly glimpsed and referred
to wishfully as “mind over matter,” a hilarious misnomer
made in ignorance.
Now John makes sense to me in those oft-quoted phrases: In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now I
know why Jesus considered words the most important element of our life;
why he said we are ”judged by every word that comes out of our
mouths.” Now I know why the newborn infant responds to words with
precise synchrony of movement, and why speech is genetic to our species.
Now I sense what Muktananda means when he continually insists that the
mantra is God. Mantra isn’t a semantic label standing for
God, Baba says, God and his name, like God and his creation, are the
same.
So the primordial sound is still sounding, and the thing and its name
are, at the primary level of creation, always of a piece. The Word lifts
order out of chaos, and that lifting is always of this instant moment,
the eternal now; and the big-bang cosmologists are right, if for the
wrong reason, and rather in spite of themselves.
The ego-centric child’s universe builds as a unison of word and
thing, and that unison is the truth of our experience; the holonomic
movement is always in unity. We separate name and thing, perhaps as
we must separate our awareness of self from God, for the adventure of
logical construction, discovery, relationship -and for the joy of reunion
and merger, coming full circle again.
©
Joseph Chilton Pearce, 2004
This book can be purchased by clicking
here
|
