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The art of chanting correctly is, first, to practice it with full awareness of its inner purpose. That purpose is not to awaken sentiments or to stir up the emotions. It is to focus the heart's feelings and raise them toward superconsciousness.
The Maharani of Cooch Behar told me she'd once asked her family priest why he intoned his chants so loudly. “Well, you see, your Highness,” he explained, “God is far away' If I don't shout, how will He hear me?” God isn't far away, of course. It is we who distance ourselves from Him by the “noise” in our own minds, a noise people often carry with them into their prayers and meditations.
Loud chanting does have its place. It is good at the start of meditation-not for the reason that priest gave, but to command attention from our own minds. Loud chanting creates a magnetic flow. Like a mighty river, it can dissolve the eddies of thought and feeling that meander idly along the banks of the mind. Like a magnetic military leader, it commands attention from your thought-soldiers and fires them with zeal.
Once you've got their attention, chant more softly, more inwardly. Direct your energy upward, from the heart to the Spiritual Eye.
Once your conscious mind is wholly engaged in chanting, bring it down into the subconscious by whispering. While chanting in the subconscious, offer it, too, up to superconsciousness at the point between the eyebrows, until you feel your entire being vibrating with the words, the melody, and the rhythm.
At last, chant only mentally, at the point between the eyebrows. Let your absorption lift you into superconsciousness. Once it does so, and once you receive a divine response, you will have spiritualized the chant. From then on. any time you sing the chant it will quickly carry you again to superconsciousness as if on a magic carpet.
To spiritualize a chant, keep it rotating in the mind-for days at a time, if necessary: not only in meditation, but as you go about your daily activities. This practice is also called japa. Christian mystics, too, speak of the continuous “prayer of the heart,” and of “practicing the presence of God.” All this is japa.
The higher aspect of chanting involves listening to the mighty sound of AUM, and becoming absorbed in it. You'll hear this sound first in the right ear. Gradually let it permeate the brain and the entire body, until every cell vibrates with that sound. Try to hear AUM in everything you do, in everything you perceive. This is true japa, when the mind no longer repeats words, merely, but is intoxicated with the bliss of the “music of the spheres.” (Editor’s note: We teach a meditation technique for tuning into the mighty sound of Aum, please see the classes page for more information)
The Cosmic Sound is described variously in the world's scriptures. The Jews and Christians call it the Amen. Muslims call it the Amin. To the Zoroastrians it is Ahunavar. To Hindus and Buddhists it is AUM. In the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the Cosmic Vibration is called the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The word AUM is an attempt to capture in human speech the sound of the Cosmic Vibration. By attuning one's consciousness to that sound (by Christians called also the Holy Ghost and the Comforter), one enters the stream of vibration that proceeded out of the Spirit, and that merges back into the Spirit at creation's end and at the end of the individual soul's cycle of outward wandering. By merging in AUM, liberation is attained.
Once the mind is focused by chanting, and the inner energy is awakened, take your chanting inward. Don't only “make a glad noise unto the Lord,” as the Bible puts it: Listen for His answer. Meditation is listening, as I've said. Feel yourself chanting in attunement, above all, with the Cosmic Sound. Harmonize yourself inwardly with that sound.
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