Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan once taught that the human voice is a barometer for the human soul. Its transparency reveals the soul’s every condition. Joy, sorrow, anger, and pain — each has its own voice that comes through, despite the most skillful deception. Conversely, the Sufi path teaches that by affecting our voice, we can affect our soul, instilling in it the qualities we desire. In this chapter, we will learn the finer points of chanting practice through the sacred sound Om, a single mantric syllable that epitomizes the depth and power of Nada Brahman, the frequency that is God.
Why is the Om so important? First of all, the Om is tremendously sonorous; there appears to be no other mantra that can match its resonance in the human body. Regardless of your body’s shape, this particular sound offers the maximum resonance possible. One objective of the sound yogi is to develop a resonant physical body through the regular use of sacred sound. Om is the single most important sound that can, by itself, configure the human body optimally for maximum resonance.
Secondly, this resonance is not static; the Om has a transparency that allows you to listen and perceive through its sound. Finally, the Om has an intrinsic ability to generate overtones. Overtones are the additional frequencies that occur over and above a tone; most tones are a mixture of the pure tone and these additional frequencies. Overtones are easily noticeable in acoustically resonant spaces, such as bathroom shower stalls, caves, or large cathedrals. Overtones are also produced in a resonant human body, and through the well-crafted tones of a trained vocalist. We naturally hear overtones when intoning the Om.
I recommend using a drone* while chanting the Om, or any mantra for that matter. Drones help generate undertones — frequencies that occur lower than the generated tone. These extended sounds are a foundation for healing; their sustained tones provide a sonic bed upon which to lie or an ocean in which to swim and explore our mantra practice. The standard drone is comprised of the root, fifth, and octave of the key you want to chant in. When undertones and overtones are produced together, as in the case of particularly long renditions of the Om, a quality of depth, connectedness, and healing issues forth from the mantra. “When the undertones are continuous, prolonged, and undisturbed, they function as a space for everything that healing music builds on.”1
There are several other, more abstract, qualities of the mantra Om. First, the Om is universal; it leads us home to a place inside where we feel safe and secure, regardless of our cultural and religious affiliations. Next, the Om is self-contained, replete with its own fullness; it brings deep contentment to the user. Because it is so self-contained, the Om is also a self-propagating sound; the more you chant it, the more you are inspired to keep chanting it. Through its utter simplicity, the Om focuses our attention quickly, taking us inward and connecting us to our depth with the least encumbrance. Finally, the Om is mysterious; it awakens in us an immediate sense of the sacred that defies rational knowledge. This is paramount to yoga practice and mysticism from any cultural stream.
The Om is similar to its Christian counterpart, the “Amen.” Both affirm the Divine presence, as they indisputably declare that the Divine is present, the Divine is all there is, and we are saying “yes” to its holy presence. Still, it doesn’t take much experimentation to deduce that the Om is far more primal and suffused with resonance than the “Amen.”
The Om is an ancient resonance that simulates the effect of a sonic womb. Physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington has created audio files simulating the sound of the “big bang,” the birth of the universe.2 He describes it thus: “The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night.”3 If you listen to this sound develop, you will find it amazingly similar to the sound of a Tibetan monk overtoning* the sacred mantra Om.
Renowned yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein describes Om as follows:
Om is an experience rather than an arbitrary verbal label. It is a true symbol charged with numinous power. Experienceable in deep meditation, it is a sign of the omnipresence of Ishvara [the Divine] as manifest on the level of sound. . . . In other words, the human voice is employed to reproduce a “sound” which is continually “recited” by the universe itself — an idea, which in the Pythagorean School came to be known as the “harmony of the spheres.” On the Indian side, it led to the development of the Yoga of Sound [Nada Yoga].4
In chapter one, I mentioned the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny, who dedicated his life to the study of sound waves. Through a machine called the “tonoscope,” he was able to visually represent patterns of sound. The tonoscope was constructed to make the human voice visible without any electronic apparatus as an intermediate link. This yielded a direct physical representation of the vowel, tone, or song of a human being, rendering a melody not only audible but visible.5 Kay Gardner, in her book Sounding the Inner Landscape, tells us that the vowel “O” appears as a perfect circle in Jenny’s tonoscope. More interestingly, the ancient Sanskrit mantra Om, when chanted into the tonoscope, shows not only the beginning “oh” sound, but also concentric diamonds and triangles within the circle formed by the harmonics during the “mmmm” at the end of the mantra. The image revealed is nearly identical to the sri yantra6 (see illustration in chapter eight). The sri yantra is an ancient, complex mystical diagram of Hinduism, associated with the supreme goddess as matrix of the universe. A stunning connection, indeed!
The syllable Om represents the totality of Brahman. In Hinduism, the Om is also the Shabda Brahman, or “sonic absolute” that I discussed earlier, meaning that there is nothing higher than what it represents. Keep in mind that the audible Om produced through human vocal cords is only a simulation of a vast cosmic resonance that embraces the known universe. The audible Om represents anahata nada, an “unstruck” sounding — the spiritual presence of the unseen source of nature’s cosmic intelligence, from which all the vibrations of the known universe emerge and into which they all disappear. Scientists call this “the field of indeterminate particles” — indeterminate because the particles appear and disappear without predictability. The only constant is the field itself; for the sound yogi, this is the field of consciousness — the fifth element of Sound Yoga (to be addressed in chapter sixteen).
Quantum physicists tell us that every measurable particle, however small, simultaneously exists as a wave of energy. Sound healer and tuning-fork expert John Beaulieu writes:
There is a similarity between cymatic pictures [the tonoscope pictures of Hans Jenny] and quantum particles. In both cases, that which appears to be a solid form is also a wave. They are both created and simultaneously organized by the principle of pulse. This is the great mystery with sound; there is no solidity! A form that appears solid is actually created by an underlying vibration.7
THE MANTRA Om is actually composed of four parts. Three of these parts are the distinct sounds “ah,” “oh,” and “mm” — the sounds you exhaled during the sectional breathing technique on page 169. The fourth is the silence that follows. The cosmic person known as Purusha, who is the universe, is said to be three-fourths in heaven and one-fourth on earth. You may recall that the same was said of Vak in chapter seven. The process of sounding the Om is broken down into these four parts, which form a progressive passageway between the manifest world of matter and energy and the unmanifest world of mind and Spirit. To understand this sonic passageway we shall look to the Maitri Upanishad:
There are two ways of contemplation of Brahman: in sound and in silence. By sound we go to silence. The sound of Brahman is Om. With Om we go to the End; the silence of Brahman. The End is immortality, union, and peace.
Even as a spider reaches the liberty of space by means of its own thread, the man [or woman] of contemplation by means of Om reaches freedom.8
This silence is not silence as we know it. It is not the absence of noise or external sound. It is, instead, that by which we are aware of sound; it is consciousness itself. All sound should lead to the experience of consciousness, which is a deep and complete awareness of the thing signified by the sound or word. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen very often. For the most part, we are content to communicate with labels, and to a large extent we are satisfied with a superficial awareness of what a word signifies. The powerful resonance and simplicity of the mantra Om reinstates consciousness in all our words, because Om truly represents — in sound and meaning — the totality of all that is and all that is not; it is both manifest universe and hidden mystery. You will find that your practice of this sound, coupled with a reverence for what it signifies, will lead to an enhanced experience in the way you communicate any sound, through any means.
Vacaspati, a famous Indian sage, explains a yogic technique of the interior apprehension of Nada Brahman through the mantra Om as follows:
Let the mind be concentrated upon the light shining in the lotus of the heart, which is located between the chest and abdomen. The eight petals of this lotus, which usually face downward, are reversed upward by the process of the expirative control of breath. In the middle thereof is the sphere of the sun, the place of waking consciousness, and it is called “A.” Above that is the sphere of the moon, the place of dreaming consciousness, the “U.” Above that is the sphere of fire, the place of dreamless sleep, the “M.”* Above that is the higher space, the sound of Brahman itself, the fourth state of ultra-consciousness.9
EACH PART of the sacred Om corresponds to a particular state of consciousness: “A” corresponds to the waking state, “U” to the dream state, and “M” to the state of deep sleep. The silence that the Om resolves into is the fourth part of the mantra, which corresponds to the state of turiya, a field of spacious consciousness considered vital to the development of yogic power because it encompasses waking, dream, and deep sleep states in concurrent continuity.
Even the visual symbol of the mantra Om is a mystical diagram that conveys this message of unified consciousness. The long, lower curve represents jagrat, the waking state and material existence. The extra length of this lower curve signifies the fact that the majority of human beings participate in this type of consciousness. The upper curve that picks up from the lower curve in the middle section of the letter represents deep and dreamless sleep, a state known as susupti. Between the two, a third coiled curve symbolizes the state of dreams, images from the unconscious and also intuitive thinking. Beyond these three states is the state of liberation, represented by the semicircle and the dot. The incompleteness of the semicircle signifies maya, the grand illusion and appearance of this world of forms, which beneath the surface is nothing but continually mobile waves of sound and energy. The dot represents illumination and turiya — the fourth state of consciousness, the silence of Om. Finite thinking cannot reach this point, which is separated from the flux of all existence.10 It is the “still point of the soul” that Teilhard de Chardin spoke of — a place within us that no illusion can tarnish.
THE MOMENT the breathing stops, we know that the body of a living creature will die. Yet breathing is not continuous; there are pauses. Even the Divine, according to Tantric cosmology, requires breath cycles to continually recite the universe into being — and, like us, it pauses between breaths. This is known as pralaya, a process by which the energy and matter used to create forms recedes into the Divine abyss, then returns to the manifest world to renew the same forms or create new forms. Quantum physicists studying the behavior of subatomic particles corroborate this theory with their observations.
Meditating on the Om offers us the direct awareness that everything in the universe is held in existence by the Divine breath. This is why the great yogic breath is of utmost importance — for intoning not only the Om, but also other vowels. The production of sound in our body enables us to participate in the creative power of the Divine; by following the production of these tones, we can trace them back to their source in the quantum realm, and there discover the source of our own being.
Spiritual wholeness is achieved through the unified breath, which makes use of the various parts of the lung you have learned to control through the divide-and-rule method in the previous chapter. The great yogic breath is a complete way of breathing that involves every section of the lungs. It expels psychic toxins lodged in the body, clears blockages in the path of our energy flow, and invigorates the body’s energy field with prana. In order to perform this great yogic breath, we must learn to coordinate the various parts of our lungs with the audible breath. To a musician, this is a bit like three-part harmony, except that the parts are successive, instead of simultaneous.
The purpose of this kind of breathing is to open every energy center, or chakra, located along the spinal cord and to clear any obstructions in the central pathway of energy that travels from the base of our spine to the top of our head. As we learned in chapter eight, a subtle body coexists with our physical body, with its own nervous system composed of psychic nerve channels called nadis. We achieve good health when the streams of our energy hum along these channels at optimal frequencies, particularly along the central susumna that travels up the spine.
The purpose of the great yogic breath (Mahat Yoga Pranayama) is to release the most primal form of the life force (kundalini) from the base of the spine, then raise it all the way to the top of the head. Like rivers on their way to the ocean, this primal energy gathers all the vibratory residues of unresolved past experiences on its upward journey, then merges with the sonic absolute, Shabda Brahman, at the top of the head. On its downward journey, this realized energy is allowed to impregnate every level of our being, right down to our roots. As our energy is allowed to travel freely up and down the spine, the circuitry of our entire nervous system is revitalized. This is the power of the great yogic breath.
SIT COMFORTABLY in your meditation position and relax. Observe your breath entering and leaving your body. Now take in a slow, deep breath and hold it for just an instant. When you start to exhale, retain maximum breath in your abdomen and release air from your upper chest first, causing the air from below, in the solar plexus region, to move into the upper chest and be forced out as well. Release air from your lower lungs only at the end of your exhalation by contracting your abdominal muscles. Regulate the flow of air in your throat, as described in the audible breath practice, so that you can control the entire process smoothly and achieve a progressive depletion of air pressure from the top down as you exhale. Employing the audible breath when you practice the great yogic breath will energize your body and lead you into profound states of meditation.
Hold the breath outside for a comfortable instant, then start to inhale. As you inhale, relax your abdominal muscles so that you can draw the air down into your gut, causing your belly to inflate. Continue to breathe, feeling this pressure rise into your solar plexus and upper chest until you are full of air. You will feel a lot of energy concentrated in your head.
Hold the breath inside for a comfortable moment, then start to exhale. Rest when you are tired or when you feel over-oxygenated. When you are rested, repeat the process.
Breath retention is important because these pauses between inhalation and exhalation are a form of sandhya, the merging of opposites that I mentioned earlier.
Some important tips: When first learning this practice, make sure that you don’t contract your abdomen when you start to exhale — a normal tendency. You want to save this contraction for the end of the exhalation. Another common error is to contract the abdomen at the start of your inhalation. You must remember to relax the abdominal muscles you tensed at the end of your exhalation so that you can breathe into your lower lungs at the start of your inhalation. Otherwise, the abdominal tension will restrict your breathing into your mid-chest and upper chest.
The great yogic breath is essential to deriving the maximum energy from toning vowels — particularly when intoning the sacred syllable Om. This method, described with movements in chapter fifteen, is also helpful for singers, students of Indian music, and those who wish to lead Hindu devotional chanting.
THERE ARE MANY WAYS of chanting the Om, but the sound yogi takes into consideration the deep symbolism of the mantra and employs all the areas of the lungs and the muscle contractions of the great yogic breath while intoning the Om. This allows the fullness of the mantra’s potency to be experienced while chanting.
It is common to purse one’s lips to pronounce the mantra Om, especially because you see it written as “Om” in English. The Sanskrit character depicting the sound is written as “AUM,” and it is pronounced accordingly, with “ah,” “oh,” and “mm” representing the three sonic parts of the mantra. When utilized in Sound Yoga, the mantra Aum begins with the vowel “ah” with the mouth wide open, jaws agape, taking care not to exaggerate the pronunciation of the opening vowel. You will notice that the fullest resonance of the “oh” sound ensues from this process.
Similarly, the middle vowel “oh” shouldn’t be stretched out for too long unless you want to “tone” the sound, rather than chant it as a mantra (toning is prolonged vocalization of a vowel). Stretching out the vowel relaxes your jaw and facial muscles but doesn’t bring about the specific spiritual power inherent in the mantra. It is important that the consonant “mm,” which is the third part of the mantra, be vibrantly sounded so that it reverberates in the cranium. Through skillful contraction of the abdominal muscles, you should control this humming so that it smoothly tapers off into a silence of the body, mind, and heart. As you can see, the practice of the great yogic breath is necessary to derive the full benefit of this mantra. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the great yogic breath must accompany the great yogic sound.
ASSUME YOUR meditation position and take a few moments to relax your face and shoulders. Keep your mind free from all deliberate activity; do not instigate, feed, or follow any of your thought processes.
1. Once you are mentally relaxed and acutely aware of your body, inhale deeply into your lower lungs. Remember to relax your abdominal muscles so that they can expand to accommodate your breath in the belly area. As your abdomen distends, allow your breath to fill your mid-chest, the sides of your rib cage, and finally the uppermost section of your lungs, just below your throat. Accomplish all this in a smooth, continuous inhalation.
2. Open your jaws wide and start to use the air in your upper chest to release the sound “ah,” simultaneously retaining the maximum amount of air in your belly and mid-chest. The volume of air in your upper chest is small, so begin at a low pitch and keep your opening vowel short.
3. Quickly launch the “ah” into an “oh” on a slightly raised pitch by using the air from your mid-chest. Try to get the sound to resonate in your upper body, and develop the sound so that it builds slightly in volume; it will appear to rise up from your belly into your chest. You will need to coordinate all this with your abdominal muscles in a way that continues to retain breath in the lower lungs, which must be saved for the “mm” that concludes the mantra.
4. As you develop the “oh” sound, begin to close your mouth; this naturally changes the vowel into the consonant “mm.” Resolve the “mm” by gradually contracting your abdominal muscles and using only a minimum amount of air. The “mm” resonates strongly in the cranium. Conclude the sound smoothly, gradually diminishing its intensity and volume with a pleasant transition into silence. Your awareness will naturally be drawn to your forehead, where you will notice a slight throbbing, particularly when you run out of breath. This is normal, as the process awakens the third eye of intuitive perception, the eye of Shiva.
5. Pause for a brief moment, holding your breath outside. When you inhale, allow your breath to pass through the throbbing sensation in your forehead. Always send your breath down to your lower lungs first to inflate those abdominal muscles that have been drawn in, then breathe into your mid-lungs, and finally, top off your lungs by allowing air into the uppermost section, just below your throat. Get ready for your second Om.
You may perform three Om mantras in this manner, rest briefly, then do two more sets of three Om mantras. That’s a total of nine Om mantras in three sets.
The bow is the sacred Om, the arrow is our own soul.
Brahman is the mark of the arrow, the aim of the soul.
Even as an arrow becomes one with its mark,
let the watchful soul be one in him [the Divine].
Mundaka Upanishad11
* A drone is a set of tones continually generated by a synthesizer, harmonium, sruti box, or stringed instrument like the tanpura. You may get yourself a drone CD from my Website (www.russillpaul.com).
* Tibetan overtone chanting is a technique in which vocal tones are manipulated by the lips, cheeks, throat, and tongue to produce a second note several octaves higher, which is superimposed on the first.
* The Aum is the same as the Om. “Aum” is simply the way it’s written, pronounced, and mystically interpreted. The practice on the accompanying audio tracks will help you understand how it sounds.