Sound vibration makes up your core. An easy way to begin to understand what makes up your inner self is to analyse the sound that goes into your ears and rolls off your tongue. You can judge a person not by the clothes they wear, but by the company they keep. Most accurately, you can judge by the sound vibration the person associates with and the sound vibration he presents to others. Sound is powerful. It moulds our consciousness.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life, so many sounds can disturb us. If you’ve ever spent the day stuck in traffic amongst honking cars in some second or third world country, you will know how stressful it is. On the other hand, when alone in a big house, you might have music on in one room and a TV on in another room to make you feel that you are not alone. The yoga texts teach us that sound can present both reality as well as illusion. The right kind of sound can free us from illusion while ordinary sound that we are familiar with in this world contributes to deepening our illusion.
MATERIAL SOUND DEADENS
The bhakti-yoga texts, especially Bhagavad Gita, explain that sound that reinforces a mistake—the mistake of thinking we are material and contact with matter will satisfy us—is our worst enemy. Now just think about the various kinds of sounds that enter into your ear holes and those that roll over your tongue. Are those sounds actually able to bring you beyond time and space, beyond beginnings and endings, beyond matter and material situations, beyond psychology and physiology? Or are the sounds you hear reinforcing your attachment to the temporary material phantasmagoria, which shoots through the sky, like a comet? Our tiny spot of a life seems to offer promise. But just as if I were to suddenly blow on some candles and extinguish them, our temporary life is stubbed out.
For this reason, we have to say that sounds reinforcing our attachment to the material scene are unhealthy. They deaden our higher faculties, and in this way, despite our sincere efforts, the sound of the materialistic mindset traps us. The bhakti-yoga texts point out that from the time you are born, you are hearing sounds of material entanglement. Just as a kitten tangles itself in a ball of yarn, similarly, we entangle ourselves in material complexity and intricacy as we seek fulfilment and gratification in the temporary cosmos.
Think about the various things you discuss with family, with friends, at the workplace, at university, on the streets, in the forest, on the boat. What is the substance of that sound vibration? What may sound like innocent chatter has an effect.
KIRTAN: SOUND UPGRADE
Before we consider how to upgrade the sound vibration that surrounds us, let’s first try to perceive the deadening effect of material sound vibration. Material sound vibration promises you temporary and external fulfilment—the promise that you are going to be satisfied with gratification, achievement, gain, acquiring, interacting, all on the material plane of physiology and psychology—the fleshy stuff and mind stuff. Besides the fleshy stuff, of course, there are the various acquisitions of matter that one hopes to possess. And then there is the mental stuff, the thoughts, such as wanting to be appreciated or recognised. “I want to be known, I want others to indicate to me that I am a good person and I am worthy of being alive.” You will be shocked to know how many people are plagued with the thought, is it worth it, my breathing in oxygen? What is so special about my life? Is it worth it—me being alive?
The constant material sound vibration pounds away at our possibilities for higher consciousness, and so we become accustomed to that as normal. If someone asks you where is your life going, you say, “Ah, we’ll see how it all works out,” or “I have some career plans, family plans.” It all sounds justified because that material sound vibration has encased you in temporariness and limitation. But kirtan (group mantra meditation performed with music) opens you to higher possibilities.
WHICH MANTRA?
As I mentioned earlier, sound can create illusion and deepen it, and sound can liberate. The right sound can supply all your nonmaterial, spiritual necessities. People have heard various mantras chanted and know what a mantra is – a particular sound that can deliver your mind from material entanglement and illusion. But, you may say, although I have heard about chanting other mantras, what about the Hare Krishna mantra? Is that distinctive of a particular group? The Hare Krishna maha mantra: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare is a yogic prescription that has existed since time immemorial.
The Hare Krishna mantra does not belong to a particular group, but when serious yoga practitioners take shelter of the Hare Krishna mantra, their lives become enhanced. Others then benefit from associating with such sincere yogis, who cultivate freedom through pure sound vibration. But this is just the beginning—the Hare Krishna maha mantra can do much more. This mantra is a sound that can supply all your necessities, and even make you think, what are my necessities? What do I actually need? We all point out how, these days, people have great difficulty distinguishing their wants from their needs: I want this, therefore, I must need it. It all collapses into one thing: “I need.” Because our mind and senses are out of control, we are easily susceptible to being bombarded by external material stimuli, and in this way our spark of illusion simply increases.
UNCOVERING YOUR CORE
We can apply the snowball effect to describe the accumulation of our needs and wants over lifetimes. As a tiny particle of pure spiritual consciousness, you have been accumulating external needs and complications life after life. Just as a snowball rolling downhill gets bigger and bigger, life’s needs keep growing. Preoccupied with the externals, we forget all about what is at the core of the snowball. In this way, our life becomes full of unnecessary desires, which are not innocent, because they force us to act unnecessarily and artificially.
Cutting through all that accumulated perplexity, artificiality, and externality, the genuine mantra helps us to shed those unnecessary layers. This process is not just about mitigating accumulated negative effects; the positive application of this genuine mantra is that it revives your dormant spiritual identity—your spiritual identity as part of the Complete Whole. That Complete Whole, the yoga texts describe, is unlimitedly attractive. Krishna means “the unlimitedly all-attractive.” The Hare Krishna maha mantra rescues our consciousness from material illusion and reconnects it with the ultimate all-attractive reality, Krishna.
FINDING THAT DORMANT RELATIONSHIP
When a child touches fire, the fire does not warn the child, do you know that I am fire, do you know I can burn? Whether the child is aware of the fire’s quality or not, the fire will burn. Similarly, whether you know what the Hare Krishna mantra is all about or not, the spiritual technological process will manifest a beneficial effect. At the same time, the bhakti-yoga texts point out that the more conscious you are of what the Hare Krishna maha mantra can do, the more profound and deep acting the effects will be.
Naturally, progressive human beings want the deepest experience—they want to get through the nebulous, vague, preliminary stage of spiritual experience, the allpervading spiritual reality, because that all-pervading spiritual reality does not give us relationships. We have to go through that spiritual haze, past the impersonal glare to get to relationships. The bhakti-yoga texts explain that when you approach the Supreme Absolute Truth from a distance, your first impression, your preliminary impression is formlessness and bright light. You can compare this to when you are driving late at night and another car is approaching you with its high beam on so your eyes are dazzled, but as you get closer, when the driver dims the lights, you can then make out the form of the car.
Similarly, when we first get some spiritual awareness, we realise that there is an all-pervading spiritual reality. Sometimes you hear people talking about the white light, or the oneness, the undifferentiated, or the spiritual cloud that pervades all beings and everyone— this is the first stage in spiritual development. But in its purified, untainted existence, relationship is what awaits us beyond the haze of the impersonal all-pervading spiritual cloud. That’s what bhakti is all about.
You will be shocked to know, however, that this is the very thing we are most afraid of, because past material relationships have given us so much suffering and disappointment. Bhakti is about reviving your dormant relationship of pure love. A love supreme. For a love to be supreme it must connect with what is unlimited and flawless. The yoga texts explain that Krishna is the ocean of all spiritual tastes and flavours. For there to be spiritual tastes and flavours there has to be relationships, so the greatest spiritual knowledge is about pure relationships between the part and the Complete Whole.
The Hare Krishna mantra works to renovate those realities. When the relationship between you, a part of Krishna, and Krishna Himself, the Complete Whole, is re-established, then you are actually natural, otherwise the struggle to be the centre of it all, in this temporary material world, is a very exhausting, frustrating process. Bhakti-yoga means to understand that you are a tiny particle of the Supreme and you are meant to exist harmoniously with the Supreme, and that the most extraordinary characteristic of the Supreme is unlimited attractiveness. Bhakti is a personal thing.
This personal feature is what makes the Hare Krishna mantra special: it has a negative aspect and a positive aspect. The negative aspect dispels illusion—the misconception that “I am this body, I am this mind,” and the positive aspect renovates your pure relationship with the Supreme Reality, Krishna. Therefore, you will hear the Hare Krishna maha mantra in so many different places and in many different tunes. In India, you will find thousands of tunes because they have been chanting Hare Krishna from time immemorial.
THE MANTRA GIVES US EVERYTHING
I would like you to consider the concept that sound can nourish you with all your necessities. It’s a mindboggling thought, at first. Especially in this age of anxiety, incompletion, disconnection. You may ask, how can sound supply me with everything I need? But that is the special characteristic of the Hare Krishna maha mantra. At the core of our being we crave authenticity, but how can we be authentic in the bleakest of times when human beings think they are most advanced but are, in reality, the first species to destroy themselves and their own habitat? How can we become an authentic being in these bewildered times when people are overwhelmed by their mind and senses, when they lack knowledge of the self, the Supreme Self and the relationship between the two? People are oppressed by consumerism, exploitation, manipulation, extortion, self-abuse, and abusing others, so how can we truly become an authentic person?
No one likes to be a fake or a phony, although material society forces that mould upon you. People who are trying to be for real finish last. You have to learn how to swim with the sharks and you’ll be successful. And that, of course, means being a phony to yourself, taking leave from whatever higher principles you may have conjured up for yourself. We don’t know what is best, we don’t know what is real, so we establish some of our own ideas about what is good, and then we become embarrassed, because even those self-established, self-created concepts of what is good, what is nice for everyone, become violated under pressure from our own mind and senses in the scramble to live.
The yoga texts explain to us that especially in this particular time, the Hare Krishna maha mantra spreads its rays like the rising sun, so anyone who takes shelter of that particular sound has all their real necessities supplied. Of course, we have to understand what our real necessities are. We are not the external garments of body and mind, therefore, we do not put all the emphasis on what is outside. What is inside is the most important, so let us not neglect the internal. The Hare Krishna maha mantra corrects that imbalance in our priorities. It readjusts our internal dynamics. Sound can do that, therefore, please take shelter of this nourishing sound and let it expand within the core of your being. In this way, your life can become rich and can be transformed according to how much you take shelter of the pure spiritual sound.
