Tuned Mantras
I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death. – John Milton, Camus
Besides being able to give more of my brash opinions,
there are many other reasons I’d love to be locked in Yogani’s
study and do an anthropological dig thru all the sources he
has drawn upon, but the AYP approach to and elucidation
of mantra-based meditation is certainly one of the biggest.
Its purpose, use of multiple frequencies, exclusion of
semantic meaning, and the timing of mantra enhancements
and lengthening are, like all else, supported by both
inner experience and modern science.
We typically begin our journey, as it were, drifting in a tippy canoe
upon a wave-tossed sea of anxiety. So what does the sensible voyageur do?
Make a bee-line to safe harbor thru the paddle-strokes of AYP mantra
and samyama! By these means we stroke, then glide into silence,
then do so again… and again… steadily pouring out a light oil
of calm until the wind and waves smooth and a sheltering yet
immense cove opens from within.
Have you reached Sanctuary yet, to be set like a gem upon a mirror,
reflecting Truth in ever-increasing proportion? Tho perfection is
something no man or gem can claim beyond a certain power of
magnification, you can know something even better: Ecstasy, where higher
perfection reigns as a self-existent force, hugging you from within like a
paradisiacal shoreline, and ringing with the sounds and sensations of
Divinity. It’s far bigger and more wonderful than any human will or ego
can possibly muster, so keep stroking your way there,
my comely Pet.
Sound, including unspoken mantra and other “unstruck sound”,
is very important to our purposes, for bliss and ecstasy are very much
a form of “listening” to a deep inner symphony we must silence
our mind sufficiently to hear. Lord Shiva advises in the
Vigyan Bhairav to “Bathe in the center of the sound,” and even the Western
clairvoyant Edgar Cayce described his trances as most akin
to a state of listening.
Aren’t we always advised to “listen to our bodies”,
and once ecstasy is rising, do we not catch
ahold of it by our newly prehensile inner ear,
simultaneously listening for and savoring the
scintillating tingle of transcendent movement and breath?
It is the ringing of our own personal temple bell:
“Listen, listen, as this beautiful sound brings us back to
our true Self.”
Everything in the universe contains vibration, from subatomic
strings to the natural resonances of planets and stars.
(“There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” [Pythagoras])
We echo many of these same frequencies in mantra and
the brainwaves found in meditation, from quiet
(theta and alpha) to ecstatic (high beta and gamma).
Coincidence? No, simple entrainment into our evolutionary
environment, the way one piano will spontaneously
“sing along with” another being played in the same room, and how
two pendulums will soon come to synchronize. (Ditto for how you end up
looking like your pet and acting like your friends, so choose wisely!)
For good reason Yogani advises the use of mantras as collections of
phonemes, or verbal sounds of a particular quality, as
opposed to words carrying specific meaning. As with musical lyrics,
meaning draws the mind into logical translation, a function of the
calculating Shallow Hal left hemisphere. Raw sound,
on the other hand, slips right by, penetrating deep into the
intuitive right hemisphere, the seat of holistic perception.
Now, who would you rather have inside you, Spock or Jesus?
(Hmm… did that come out right?)
Mantra contains both rhythm and pitch. When a person
listens attentively to a rhythm stimulus, brainwaves
modulate to match the tempo, causing changes in mood,
arousal, attention, and the release of endorphins.
Fast beats alert and excite, whereas slow beats,
such as those contained in mantra, assist in meditation
and deep emotional response.
The fullest spiritual potency of mantra, however, comes
when multiple frequencies are incorporated. Pitch and rhythm
variation, called prosody, is instinctively used to convey emotion
to others, and impacts both listener and speaker. In fact,
studies show that people who use or listen to lilted speech
score more highly on measures of empathy, a major
component of love! Of course the counter is also true, so
it stands to reason that speaking in monotone leaves your heart
monochrome and unless you speak lilted you’ll end up stilted!
Since the brain is in many ways like a muscle, becoming stronger
in the direction in which it is exercised, using mantras with prosody
increasingly strengthens and enriches our ability to empathize
and nurture, a power that can be used with or without
an object, and radiated toward both the particular and the
universal. And though the path to melting love can
walked with spoken mantra, travel becomes swifter in unspoken form,
when we run silent and deep. The ego is then much less
likely to accompany us, making sotto voce comments
on how our practice is being received by others. More important,
although what we say or hear shapes us, it is from silence that God
speaks (unless you’re friggin’ nuts like me) so we are more inclined to
listen. Then like baby birds reminded of their True Song,
we go on to sing it.
Flat intonation of a flat mantra can make
one an emotional earth dweller and the body with it. Some
traditions may seek this, but Yogani wants us to open our wings
and soar, so stresses the use and feel of sudden
and dramatic changes in pitch, again scientifically shown
to stretch our hearts to new limits.
But proof really lies no farther away than the nearest baby.
Don’t have one? They’re pretty easy to catch – you know,
just for demonstration purposes. You’ll immediately notice
that they’re real experts at belting out motivational
sound with lots of range and gusto. Being completely
dependent on others for survival, they pop into the world like
little nude master-class fishermen, and promptly begin to cast
noisy lures out over our aural gunwales, hook us
in the heart, and reel us in like mindless guppies.
Adults are almost helpless to resist, really. That’s
because babies have a trick up their jumpers:
the use of prosodic sound as an empathy tractor beam.
It’s a fetal attraction (!) and their first crib sheet
on the social world, at least until they learn to cuss
and throw rocks (just kidding). Yeah, they cheat,
darn diminutive criminals! How many times have
you yourself felt your heart stolen by one?
But it’s all to a good cause, for this
call-and-response circuitry is a deeply embedded and
necessary part of nurturing, because in isolation babies
don’t survive and adults don’t thrive. (Trust me on that.)
And speaking of adults,
multi-toned mantras are much like tantric love-making
or good music in repeatedly building, then releasing an
exquisite inner tension within us. They raise a living anticipation,
hint at its satisfaction, and then deliver the goods again and again.
You’ll swear you can actually feel the sound’s primary locus
sliding up and down inside your body and mind with the frequency.
It’s like taking a pipe-cleaner to your nervous system,
or getting a good mental flossing, digging deep into the roots
of our being to loosen and remove accumulated
mental plaque and debris.
The sensation is nothing so much as becoming a taut-strung
divine instrument, with God’s love-rosined bow being
drawn across one’s innermost fibers – gah! –
you can feel every catch and tug and long aching vibrato,
and a sense of vast Heavenly motion
rises from even the most subtle source, including
prosodic mantra. I suppose a monotone drone has its
merits, but to bring a really satisfied flush to the cheeks
there’s nothing like a strong and steady tossing on
sheets of sound or satin!
I find all I need while seated, but in its reflection
see you, Gazelle-Eyed One, stonting high in
a Samadhi sky, breaking the bonds
of mundane life and illusion. There, stroked by
the sun, soothed by the shade, a gladsome gazelle
is surely made! (Tell me ‘tis not so, my curvate Doe.)
What truly is now left to Reach, once we reside as Divine
denizens in our own Heaven-Realm, enfolded in
a 100-fold state based not on unproven assertion
but on easily-accessed and direct experience?
This is firm knowledge, not flimsy belief, so can never
come to be doubted or put aside and forgotten.
Just dip the tongue in the Sweetness to know! The sand
has been whisked from beneath our spiritual home, and we sit
secure as barnacles upon unwavering bedrock, relaxed
against the curved shell of our bliss. Come, let us drum
against our glowing nacreous home and
“…Sing the Body Electric”!
All this doesn’t happen overnight. The ripening
process has been described this way: first you speak the mantra,
then the mantra speaks itself, and finally the mantra
speaks you. Indeed, in time it dissolves into the breath
to become a God-filled frisson on the
uptake and an Angora-skein of warm love on the out.
The vibratory sensation comes then not from words or syllables,
but arrives “unstruck” and self-born from within yourself.
This is the “characteristic sign” of your inner guru,
whispering back at you. It has been there all along,
but only now are you sufficiently silent and sensitized
within to notice that the Divine is tangibly touched
on each stroke of the breath, every play of the body.
You have Awakened to find that you are literally
swimming in God (!), and every part and parcel of
life and being has become a prayer of gratitude.
Let your newfound awareness, your inner guru,
then teach thru its direct rewardings what is asked of
you in terms of practice and everyday life, for to each
is given their own time, measure, and manner. To paraphrase
Joseph Campbell, “Follow your bliss, and the rest follows.”
In my view, AYP opens our inborn ecstatic propensity
by developing both mindfulness and concentration
simultaneously. Mindfulness is the inner silence
that leads to greater sensitivity and receptivity.
It is like sunlight: all-encompassing, shining on all
things, warming and softening us inside. Concentration
is the ability to focus intently and exclusively on
one thing. It is the lens that gathers the light of
mindfulness into a single burning point, the farmer’s
seed drill that plants a divine spark into our newly
yielding and fertile ground. There may be other ways, but none so swift
and certain, to grow a Burning Bush of ecstasy of our very own!
Meditation is mostly mindfulness, but without
something to concentrate on it can,
especially in the early stages, allow our monkey-mind
to start throwing turds at us, creating wild
kundalini side-effects. But mantra and samyama
fading into ultra-fineness present a blend of concentration
and open awareness that helps inner silence comfortably
grow thru the use of retractable training wheels. Perfect!
Mantra gives our mind something to grasp and
return to, filtering out unwanted and distracting
stimuli, whether inward or outward generated.
It buoys us against the mental entropy of
day dreaming, and locks the mind into a firm
perceptual present moment.
The brain’s frontal lobes, most importantly the
left prefrontal cortex – a major happiness center (!) –
are highly active while holding this attention,
keeping our mind from wandering off task.
The insular cortex, which mediates much of our
experience of empathy, love, and warmth
(Yogani’s “melting love”) is meanwhile being
polished to a toasty lambent glow. Last but not
least, the auditory cortex works to hold a
memory of the mantra sequence, anticipating and
triggering the next repetition thru the brain’s speech
centers whether it is spoken aloud or silently.
Slow but sure, we are being fashioned into sound ecstatics!
Confused? Simply inquire within: focus intently on
the soundstage between your ears, where the headline act
tonight is Love in the guise of God – yes the
God of your choice! (Of course, it doesn’t hurt
that intent listening stimulates thru cranial
nerve pair VII connected to the middle ear.)
So cock your ears carefully, my fawn-soft dear!
As in good love-making, both stamina and subtlety
are required, and mantra/samyama develop them together.
The brain areas involved may start out relatively
weak but strengthen with practice, with long-term
consistency being more important than session length.
Increases in neural thickness and density actually become
visible in brain scans on ripened meditators.
Yogani slowly adds mantra length as our concentration
holding ability grows. To proceed too quickly would snap
the mantra’s thread as we pull it thru our minds,
and the effect would be lost. But have patience and just let that mantra
shuttle fly, for by-and-by the skill of a seamstress develops and
meditation become a silk-smooth sari of embroidered delight!
Let’s now examine mantra tones in more detail, starting
at the high end with SHREE. Ah yes, now there’s a
complex vintage wine of a sound, walking the impossible
edge of tart and sweet. Shrill and bladelike, it slices
away our mental lethargy. It’s like a female air controller’s
voice cutting thru the fog of war for mission pilots.
It snags our attention like a hangnail, piercing the most
resistant carapace of consciousness like an infant’s shriek
of distress, funereal keening, a soprano’s reach, a
bagpipe’s wall of dissonant overtones.
To our ancestral mind it’s a real monkey-prod up
the shushumna: a cry of alarm, a scream of pain, the skitter of predator
claw across stone (why we wince at fingernails on blackboard?).
It slings the nervous system to the treetops – our instinctual escape route –
but because it occurs during the relative calm of meditation,
the impetus goes toward spiritual ascension instead.
There should be no doubt where the word is aimed, for what does
SHREE sound or even look like? An onomatopoetic shriek?
Maybe I’m just a silly simian, but don’t you feel its pull into your
crown, your tippy-top branches? (Am I going too primitive on you?)
Anyway, similarly, the “I” in I AM is a gentler stimulator
used to develop your aural palette and early climbing skills,
just as AUM is a fruit best picked later, when you can peel it
with your newly-muscled kechari tongue of discernment – whoa!
The relationship between dissonant high sound and meditation has
even been verified in the lab. Most people’s brains react to a scream
in areas related to empathy and the desire to act,
but in meditators these virtuous responses become increasingly
strong in relation to practice time. Eventually a continual mindset
of compassion develops that requires only simple awareness of another’s
suffering to overtop the loving-cup, and since, like the breath,
suffering is ever-present, you’re never without a stimulus to
act! (Feel free to do so now…)
To cite a forgotten influence: just as “…the wolf’s tooth whittled
so fine / The fleet limbs of the antelope…” [Jeffers],
an edged note helps shape our minds to equally elegant
proportions. So let’s go, Michelangelo, pick up your chisel!
Now on to the bass clef – the low humming mantra sounds.
Here it’s best to let naturalist/poet Diane Ackerman speak:
“It’s like a massage from the inside, very soothing. Another reason
it is so conducive to meditation is that it creates an inner white
noise which cancels out extraneous noise, making your body a
soundproof booth… For a baby in the womb the mother’s heartbeat
performs the ultimate cradlesong of peace and plenty; the surf like
waves of her respiration lull and soothe… Do we ever forget
that sound? When babies begin talking, their first words are
usually the same sound repeated.”
Good point, Diane. How does the song go?
“De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da,
The innocence will pull me through.
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da,
The innocence says all that’s true.” - Sting
But babies do not have exclusive prerogative over innocence!
We can all find it again, for real lotus-power arises when
high alerting and low soothing sound follow one upon
the other in a continuous cycle – prosody! A similar inner
sensation and impact on the brain results from Tibetan tonglen
practice, where the suffering of others is breathed in and
love is breathed out. Once you’ve become sufficiently sensitized,
the sensation is equally, well, ecstaticized!
It seems paradoxical for a repeating cycle of dissonant and
consonant sound or mental constructs to have a positive
spiritual effect until you consider its likely evolution in
mammalian child rearing. We all know that when an infant
cries, the mother’s instinct is to rush to its aid. She is
strongly stimulated at a subconscious level, bounding
unhesitantly up from even deep sleep, and you are ill-advised
to block her path!
Once together, sounds of distress are replaced by lower-frequency
sounds of soothing and comfort, including very mantra-like
sing-song baby talk, humming and singing. Tell the truth, Mom,
in those moments haven’t you stepped outside yourself as
profoundly as in meditation? And Baby, you who still resides in
each adult, I know you recall the crib-magic when Mother-Goddess
reached for you and all that was bitter turned to sweetness. In fact,
such is the resulting sageness of babies that they remind us how to
talk properly, and so we switch to sing-song language in their presence.
(“Baby’s Way”, indeed, Tagore). How much more clearly does lilt
go to gild a golden, guileless gilt on sound and Soul!
But back to the moment when baby and mother are reunited – pulled
back together by a lasso of sound. With the swing in sound also occur
powerful internal biological changes, not the least of which is replacement
of stress chemicals by a veritable cocktail of happy juices, principally
endorphins (pleasure), dopamine (reward), and oxytocin (love-bonding
and nurturing). This aural and internal call-and-response blankets the
nurseries of the earth, and provides the deep and ancient origins of the
multi-tone mantra I hear in AYP. Mother love was herewith born!
Designed to nurture, females hear this Song of Songs strong from the
start, and perform it with dolls until the real audience arrives. With
practice, males can become virtuosos too, becoming sutra-stitched
into cuddly Raggedy Andys. (And you’re pulling my pucker string
now, naughty child!)
Extrapolating the science further: when mammalian brains
enlarged and the young needed more maturation time
and support, the mom-child bond evolved and expanded
to hold the mating couple together to work as a parenting
team, thereby linking sex to love, and erotic energy to
spiritual energy - the blended power source of tantra yoga.
Sensual and romantic was herewith born! (Who said science
wasn’t sexy?)
For mutual protection, social mammals in turn extended
this bond to the “group”, explaining how we can feel
empathy for those to whom we are not directly related
and don’t even know, and why tantra can develop an
open, objectless love that allows us to melt and flow
effortlessly down the same neurochemical river of
reward as blissfully contented moms and excited lovers,
even when alone. (Oh, don’t I know.)
Divine Love was herewith born!
Well, that’s about enough
“singing the praises” of sing-song mantra!
Any contradictions to Yogani’s greater wisdom or
resemblance to actual fact are unintended and due
solely to my foolish overexuberance.
(But how can we rightly blame Something that floats in the
air pointing out words here and there? –huh? huh?)
-Ananda T.
