6

Sacrifice and Mantra

The subject of sacrifice plays an important role in the Gita; we find it keeps cropping up there. But it’s a hard practice for us in the West to relate to. “Sacrifice” is kind of an alien concept in our culture; I’ve certainly always had a hard time with it myself. I think that’s because most of us have a pretty limited view of what sacrifice is all about; we figure it’s probably uncomfortable, and may have something to do with killing goats. Yet if the Gita keeps leading us toward it, and if we’re adopting the perspective of the Gita and the Gita endorses sacrifice, then maybe we ought to take a second look at our own ideas about the subject. When we do, we discover that the Gita is inviting us into a much subtler relationship with the concept, one in which sacrifice is an act designed to lead us across the boundary between the wordly and the spiritual.

Just to set the stage, here are some excerpts from the Gita about the subject of sacrifice. You’ll see that the slokas deal with sacrifice from a number of different perspectives—sometimes in very ritualistic terms, sometimes from a deeper level.

Krishna says, “Thus spoke the Lord of Creation when he made both man and sacrifice: By sacrifice shalt thou multiply and obtain all thy desires. By sacrifice shalt thou honor the gods, and the gods will then love thee. And thus in harmony with them shalt thou attain the supreme good.” And then he goes on: “Food is the life of all beings, and all food comes from the rain above. Sacrifice brings the rain, and sacrifice is sacred action. Sacred action is described in the Vedas, and these come from the Eternal, and therefore is the Eternal ever present in a sacrifice.”

Ram Dass’s Gita Notes: Ram Dass typed out the entire text of the Gita, paragraph by paragraph, with spaces between each sloka for recording his reflections on that passage. These are some of his notes from chapter 3 of the Gita.

Now there are a lot of concepts raised in that passage, but the one I’d like to lead off with is this sentence: “By sacrifice shalt thou honor the gods, and the gods will then love thee.” That’s a beautiful relationship that’s being alluded to there, being implied there. It acknowledges that on the astral planes, there are beings who represent all the different facets of our existence. They are represented, for example, in all the many deities of the Hindu pantheon. By taking each part of our life and offering it to the particular astral aspect that’s related to it, we form an alliance, if you will, across planes of consciousness. That is the beginning of an understanding of the interrelatedness in the universe of the worldly and the spiritual planes.

That’s a beautiful, profound point. See, our study of karma gave us a feeling for the interrelatedness of things in a worldly sense, a feeling for the way in which everything in the material plane is lawfully interrelated with everything else. Now we’re coming back to explore the same principle of the interrelatedness of things after we’ve transcended our attachment to the gunas, after we’ve entered into the Brahman, entered into the spiritual domain that incorporates the worldly one. Now we can look and see that not only is everything in the material plane interrelated, but that there is also an interrelatedness across planes.

It’s from that perspective that we begin to explore our relationship to the spiritual aspect of sacrifice. Our word “sacrifice” comes from the same root as sacred, and sacrifice has to do with making something holy. The worldly and the spiritual are interconnected. And what is the connection across those domains? It is the act of sacrifice. Through sacrifice we acknowledge the connection. Sacrifice starts to give credence to the reality of the living spirit. It starts to give recognition in our daily lives to an awareness of Brahman.

If we accept all that, and decide that sacrifice sounds like a useful idea, what do we do next? What does it mean? What do we sacrifice? “There are yogis whose sacrifice is an offering to the gods; but others offer, as a sacrifice, their own soul in the fire of God,” says the Gita. “Yogis whose sacrifice is an offering to the gods”—that’s the ritualistic way we’ve usually thought about sacrifice: that you slaughter a lamb in sacrifice, or that you throw ghee into the fire as a sacrifice. But the Gita goes on—it says, “others offer, as a sacrifice, their own soul in the fire of God.” Now we’re exploring a new possibility—the possibility that the sacrifice is not of some object, but of ourselves.

So what of ourselves do we sacrifice? Krishna runs through a whole catalog of yogic sacrificial practices. He says, “In the fire of an inner harmony, some surrender their senses in darkness, and in the fire of the senses some surrender their outer light.” He’s saying that some yogis go into dark rooms or caves; they cut out the images that the world bombards us with. Some even go so far as to put out their eyes, to blind themselves so they’ll no longer be distracted by the sight of worldly things. Still others use meditative practices to extract their awareness from their eyes, so that even if there were light out there they wouldn’t see it, because they have surrendered “seeing.” “Others,” he says, “sacrifice their breath of life . . . and still others, faithful to austere vows, offer their wealth as a sacrifice, or their penance, or their practice of yoga, or their sacred studies, or their knowledge. Others through practice of abstinence offer their life into Life. All those who know what is, sacrifice, and through sacrifice purify their sins.”

Remember earlier on, when we asked, If we’re going to give up desires, what desire do we use to give up desires? Now here comes the answer: We use the desire to offer it all in sacrifice. All of it, even the desire to make the sacrifice, becomes the sacrificial offering. That’s the return to the roots, spiritualizing life through offering up all of our acts as the sacrifice for our own transformation. We sacrifice the ego’s goals, the ego’s individual point of view. We throw every part of ourselves into the fire. Swaha! Take it, God—just let me be free.

In a way, the end product of all the yogas is sacrifice. You can even take a very intellectual practice, something like gyan yoga, and turn it into sacrifice. Krishna refers to that. “Know that all sacrifice is holy work,” he says. “But greater than any earthly sacrifice is the sacrifice of sacred wisdom, for wisdom is in truth the end of all holy work.” You learn it all, and then you offer it all up. That’s the tricky predicament for the gyan yogi, as we said before, but now we’re shown the way we can work with that:Turn it into the stuff of your sacrifice, turn it into what it is you have that you can offer.

There are, in the Vedas, various descriptions of the manifestation of the One into form, the passage from the One into the many, and that act of creation is always seen as an act of sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice for the One to give up its Oneness and become the many. So then our acts of sacrifice back into the One complete the wheel; they spiritualize life, and bring the whole cycle into harmony. As we start to take part in it, we begin to experience the entire universe as linked in one stupendous act of sacrifice, each part offering to the other. Sacrifice awakens us to the fact that we are part of a process, part of a divine play. It helps us get past the pomposity of thinking about our personal, special gratification all the time, so we can see ourselves instead as part of what Paul called “Christ’s body.”

Those of you who have been in human relationships where real love was present recognize experiences in which the well-being of your beloved was more important than your own. You’d offer your own discomfort to ensure their well-being. If you can extrapolate from that experience to a time (called the Satya Yuga) when everybody makes that kind of offering in relation to everybody and everything else, you’ll have a taste of what it is like to live in the Spirit.

But you know, you really don’t have to worry about whether everybody else is doing it or not. You just begin to get your own house in order. Recognizing your complete interrelatedness with all of it and with your own spiritual source changes the meaning of each act, and therefore both the reason and the way it’s done.

For people who have not experienced the Brahman, who have not experienced identity with the spiritual One behind the personality and the body, there are limited options when they approach the subject of sacrifice. They can simply pass on it, dismiss it. Or they can ritualize it. They can either say, “Well, I hear all that you’re saying—and it all sounds awfully nice. But I’m not going to do anything about it, because that Brahman stuff is all just words to me.” Or else they can adopt a kind of ritualistic sacrifice, which has a certain tradition or form to it, but doesn’t partake much of Spirit.

For example, in the Indian pattern we talked about, there’s a certain formalism. You study in order to arrive at intellectual understanding, and then you start to lead a satvig existence, a pure existence, and to do certain kinds of sacrifice. You’ll see many Indians living their lives that way, according to Vedic prescriptions, and doing very ritualistic forms of sacrifice. But often the sacrifice isn’t rooted in the direct experience that would make the sacrifice a free act; it’s still coming out of the thought, “It’s my duty to do this.”

In the Hindu tradition, there are many categories of sacrifice, or yagya, which a Brahmin is required to perform every day. There’s Brahma Yagya—the learning and spreading of scriptural texts. There’s Pitri Yagya—the offering of oblations of water and rice to dead ancestors. There’s Bhuta Yagya—the feeding of dumb animals and birds. There’s Nri Yagya—the worship of guests or the needy.

Take Nri Yagya—that’s an incredible one. Maharajji said, “Whoever comes to you is your guest. Love, respect and welcome him, serve prasad. Feeding the hungry is actual worship. First bhojan [food], then bhajan [prayer].” When I walk into the home of a friend in India, I am treated as God. I am given the love and respect and feeding that God would be given if She walked through that door. It’s not because it’s me—anybody who walks into that house is treated the same way. It’s part of their practice of spiritualizing life: that every guest who enters your home turns into God. It’s like Elijah in the Jewish religion, the unexpected guest who’s come. So the Indians welcome you, and they worship you; they put the tilak on your forehead, they bring you gifts, and they seat you in a special place—all because you happened to drop by! That’s a whole other way of looking at who it is that’s come for a visit. It’s a spiritual practice, because it’s a reminder to stay open to the game at more than one level. That’s the way all these yagyas work.

To many Brahmins, these practices are done to atone for whatever unconscious karmic acts they might have committed “while with the broomstick, the waterpot, the grinding stone, the oven, or the mortar and pestle,” as they say. That is, they’re acknowledging that just in living their daily lives they’ve been creating all kinds of karmic stuff for themselves, and their practices are a way of cleaning that up. Doing the rituals every day is a way of working out karma all the time. It’s very ritualistic, but it’s a useful technique.

When I talk about “ritualistic” qualities of sacrifice, I don’t want you to think I’m putting down ritual itself. Far from it. Rituals can be powerful tools. They can bring the sacred into our lives, and remind us that there are many levels to our games. In fact, I think it’s a useful exercise to take some part of our everyday lives, and consciously turn it into a ritual. Food might be a good one to work with, as an exercise in bringing consciousness to an area in which desire most often reigns. Other than air and water, food is the thing most critical to our survival, and so desires around it get built into us very strongly. It can be hard to stay conscious around desires which are that powerful. But there are practices for dealing with food that turn it into a sadhana, and make it part of that process through which everything in our lives becomes part of the teaching, part of the awakening process.

One way to bring that kind of consciousness to the food we eat is to make the eating an offering. In the fourth chapter of the Gita, there is a sloka that concerns sacrifice, and the notes connected with it in most texts say that the sloka is used at mealtimes by many people in India. It’s the mantra I use each time I take food.

I used to have this delightful little play with my father around my doing this mantra. We’d sit down at the table, and as he was lowering himself into his chair, his hand would already be reaching for his fork. Before he was in the chair, the first bite of salad would be in his mouth, and he’d be crunching the lettuce. Midway through the bite, he’d realize that I was saying a blessing, and he’d stop in mid-crunch. But every now and then, if I took too long with the mantra, I’d hear a quick “Crunch!” It’s like he was pushing me just a little bit: “Get on with it, so we can eat!” It was a beautiful, funny dance we’d go through together.

Mind you, I didn’t try to lay it on heavy—I didn’t care if he ate his lettuce or not; but he’d say, “Oh, no, no—I won’t eat while you’re praying.” He asked me once, “What are you saying, anyway?” I told him, and after that he’d join in on the “shanti, shanti, shanti,” and then he’d say, “Amen!” It’s the best of all worlds!

This is the mantra.

Brahma pranam, Brahma havire, Brahmagni, Brahmanahota Brahmaitan Gantabiyam Brahmakarma Samadina Gurubrahma, Guruvishnu, Gurudevomaheshwara Gurusakshat Parambrahma Tus maee shree guruvenama ha Om, shanti, shanti, shanti.

The first two lines of the mantra say, Realize, as you’re taking this food, that the food itself is part of Brahman, part of the unmanifest whatever-it-is that lies behind form. Did you remember that, the last time you had a meal? All the time you thought it was food, when what it really was is dense spirit.

Oh, but we’re not going to stop there, says the mantra. The food is Brahman, but the fire into which you’re offering the food (which can be the fire of your hunger, the fire of your desire, as well as the sacred fire into which you throw the ghee)—that fire is part of Brahman, too. You thought the fire of your hunger was just a fire? No, that fire is Brahman. So now you’re feeding Brahman into Brahman.

Ah, but we haven’t finished yet. Who do you think is doing it? Do you think you’re doing it? Do you think you’re going to eat the food to fulfill your desire? No. After all, you’re Brahman, too. So now it’s Brahman offering Brahman into the fire of Brahman. And who are you offering it to? Who do you think all those beings are—the gods and all of that? What is that? It’s Brahman. Far out.

So it turns out that you are Brahman feeding Brahman to the fire of Brahman and offering it to Brahman—which means nothing is happening at all. See? The whole thing is an illusion—it’s all Brahman playing with Brahman. It’s all the play of the Lord, it’s all divine lila. And you thought you were just going to eat a meal!

That’s the first half of the mantra. Then the second half of the mantra offers the food to the various ways in which the Spirit becomes manifest in the universe. The food is offered to the guru, meaning to God in manifest form; it is offered to the guru as the creator, to the guru as the preserver, and to the guru as the force of change—that is, as Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva; and it is offered to that which lies behind all those aspects—to Parambrahma, to the Ultimate. And then finally the mantra says, I touch the lotus feet of the guru; that is, I surrender once again. After that there is a silent moment, in which we can add whatever blessings or metta we want to send out into the world, and then we end by saying, “Om, shanti, shanti, shanti”—“peace, peace, peace.”

Now after that, and keeping all that in mind, go ahead and enjoy your dinner. Every time you take a bite, remember that you’re not “eating”—you’re Brahman pouring Brahman into Brahman. Then, since you’re not identified any longer with your hunger, and not identified any longer with being the eater, the food just is what it is, and you’ll eat just what you need to eat. You’ll see it all as merely the play of Brahman, in which the whole process is done as a sacrifice in order that it all may merge into Brahman.

Using a mantra like that is just one technique for working with food and making it your practice. There are many strategies for dealing with food in a way that changes the meaning of the experience of eating. There are Buddhist practices, for example; one of them, part of the punya, or wisdom, path, involves a reperception of what it is that we’re eating; another is a meditation on the process of eating itself. There are examples of those meditations in “The Supplemental Syllabus,” so you can experiment with them. Jewish dietary laws and Christian fasting at Lent are both familiar practices, and they are designed to reorient our relationship with food, to spiritualize it.

At retreats I’ve run, I’ve sometimes had a huge meal prepared, usually on our last day together. We’d all plan that this was going to be a final feast that we’d share; everybody would get excited, building up to the dinner. The table was laid out. We’d sit down. Everybody was anticipating the food. They’d been building up their hunger, their desire.

Then I would start by giving a long blessing of the food. You could see the cooks thinking, “But the food’s getting cold!” I would ask everybody to keep doing the blessing until everybody was really doing the blessing, really feeling it. In order to do the blessing that way, the cooks would have to give up worrying about the food getting cold, and the diners would have to give up anticipating the food they were about to eat.

When the blessing was finished, I would say, “Now before we eat, I would like to read to you the Buddhist meditation on the repulsiveness of food.” I would then read the passages about the food mixing with the spittle at the end of the tongue and eventually turning into shit and all that. At that point, the cooks wouldn’t really care whether the food got cold or not, and the diners would decide that they really weren’t very hungry anymore.

Finally, I would proceed to describe the way we were going to eat—very slowly, very meditatively, very intentionally. And by then, the banquet would be ruined.

At that point, I would ask people to stop and notice their reactions to the whole experience. I’d say to them, “After all the years you’ve been eating for your pleasure, how much does it cost you to surrender a little of that pleasure into becoming mindful of the process of eating?”

Most of us, most of the time, are totally unconscious around the subject of food. If we pay attention to it at all, it’s usually to obsess neurotically about it. Those of you who have a weight problem will notice that if you focus on getting thin, you’ll be suffering, suffering, suffering all the time. But if you become mindful in your eating, you will get thin. And those of you who are into cooking and into the exquisite subtleties of food—there’s nothing wrong with any of that; it can be done as a yoga, too. But we have gone so far overboard in sense gratification that our ability to even imagine using food sacredly, merely for survival and maintenance of the body, has almost vanished. And part of our sadhana involves experimenting with each aspect of our lives for its potential as part of our awakening.

That process goes on and on, and there comes a step that takes us beyond making just our food and our eating the sacrifice. The more profound path of sacrifice that Krishna outlines is the sacrifice of one’s self—meaning that we begin to do every act we do in the light of our awareness of Brahman. As our practice gets deeper and deeper, that awareness of Brahman takes on flesh and blood; it starts to be a deeply valid sense of relatedness, to something much greater than the games we’ve been playing. We were always asking, “Am I getting enough?” Now we start asking, “How can I get rid of all my stuff, so I can become part of everything?” That flips around the meaning of every act.

In the example of eating that we’ve been using, you get so that you feed your body, so that you can maintain the temple, so that you can deepen your wisdom, so that you can increase your samadhi, so that you can get through your ego, so that you can come to Brahman. Far out! And that includes having that pizza—I mean, it’s all of it. Everything you eat becomes your offering. The offering, the sacrifice—that becomes what eating is all about for you.

But using food that way is only the beginning. Your offerings include everything you do—the sneaky stuff, too. Like how about when you’ve just bad-mouthed somebody. You’re sitting around gossiping, and suddenly you think, “This is my offering to God at this moment—far out! Look what I offered God today.” Gossip? Greed? Lust? Great. I mean, don’t worry about it, don’t judge it—the Brahman can take it all in, no problem. Just notice your action, notice what it is you’re offering to God.

How about suffering? Are you offering your suffering to God? Ouspensky, in his book on Gurdjieff, said, “Another thing that people must sacrifice is their suffering. Nothing can be attained without suffering, but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering.” ¹ As that happens, a shift takes place inside of you. You begin to see your suffering as grace. You don’t have to get as far out as the monk, standing in the lake and crying, “God, God, give me more pain.” You don’t have to do a masochistic trip. But you get to the point where, when you are suffering, that suffering is your fire of purification. You say, “Yeah. Right. Isn’t this hell? Am I ever suffering!” See? The suffering is your offering into the fire.

There’s a lightness which has entered into the suffering at that point, and it’s important. You can’t sit around steeped in self-pity and do much sadhana: “Oh, it’s so hard! I’m in this temple, and the food is terrible, and—oh, how I’m suffering.” Not much quality of “offering” in that. Instead, you become like Swami Ram Dass. He was thrown out of a temple, and had to spend the night by the side of the river, where the mosquitoes kept biting him. He just kept saying to Ram, “Oh, thank you, Ram, for sending the mosquitoes to keep me awake so I can think of you.”

And eventually there’s another thing you have to offer up: How about offering up your fascination with it all? As long as you’re still doing it for the experience of it, the sacrifice is coming up short. You’re saying, “Yeah, I’ll throw a little ghee into the fire—that’ll be interesting for me.” That experiencer / enjoyer? That one has to go, too. It doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it, but you won’t be attached to being the enjoyer. You’ve sacrificed that too. Of course, you’ll then make a bizarre discovery: that the more you sacrifice, the more you come into the spirit, and the more you come into the spirit, the more you get it all—the more you’re having it all, every moment. But that can’t happen until you’ve really thrown it all away.

So that huge mouth of the sacrifice is a gateway into Brahman. It’s the gateway through which you pour your life into the Brahman, just keep pouring and pouring your whole existence into the Brahman. You forget, and you think you’re in it for yourself: “Oh, yes— I’m going to get enlightened!” But then you also keep remembering, remembering that you’re part of it all, part of the endless circle of sacrifice.

There is a mantra I used to work with, to awaken the energy of sacrifice. I would focus on the ajna, the sixth chakra, and I would say, “I am a point of sacrificial fire, held within the fiery will of God. I am a point of sacrificial fire, held within the fiery will of God.” If you do that long enough, your ajna, your third eye, becomes like a burning fire of sacrifice. It’s a power mantra; it’s a mantra that turns you into part of the sacrificial fire.

And then when you’ve awakened that energy, you take everything you do, and you throw it into that fire. Every experience, every thought, every feeling—you feed it all into the fire. You’re converting all your desires, all your perceptions, into an offering. It’s a total conversion of the worldly into the spiritual—the mantra gives you a vehicle for doing that. You sacrifice identifying yourself as the doer, the enjoyer, the knower, the delighter, the collector, the experiencer—you sacrifice all that into the realization of the big-E Enjoyer, the merging that comes through that sacrifice. That Enjoyer is the atman in you; that’s the real bliss, and so you sacrifice enjoyment into being the Enjoyer.

In that example, we used mantra to awaken the sacrificial fire into which we fed our offerings. And that brings us right to the second subject of this chapter, which is mantra. The word “mantra” means “mind-protecting.” A mantra is something that protects the mind from itself, really, by giving it some fodder other than the thinking process. There are many, many types of mantra. Most spiritual traditions have them. There are power mantras, like the one we just worked with. There are seed mantras, like “Om,” that express some essential vibratory quality of the universe. There are mantras to activate each chakra in your body.

When I was studying with Hari Dass in India, I learned mantras for every single activity I engaged in every day. I learned mantras for waking up and mantras for going to sleep. I learned a mantra for taking a shower. I learned mantras for going to the toilet—for each type of going to the toilet. I learned mantras for everything. And the purpose of the mantras was to keep reminding me to turn it all into a sacrifice, an offering.

Swami Muktananda used to tell a story about a saint who once was giving a discourse on mantra. A man in his audience stood up and said, “What is this nonsense about mantra? Who wants to waste time repeating the same word over and over again. Do you think if you chant ‘bread, bread, bread’ it will fill your belly?”

The saint jumped up from his seat. He pointed his finger at the man, and shouted, “Shut up and sit down, you stupid ass!” Well, the man was furious. He got red in the face, and his whole body started shaking with rage. He sputtered, “You call yourself a holy man, and you use a foul term like that in talking to me?” The saint said very mildly, “But, sir, I don’t understand. You heard yourself called an ass just once, and look how it’s affected you. Yet you think that our repeating the Lord’s name over and over again for hours won’t benefit us.”

Muktananda’s story relates to one of the levels at which a mantra affects us—a level at which the effect has to do with the meaning of sacred names or phrases. In other words, it has to do with our associations to the words. But apart from any images the names call up for us, the sound of the mantra itself has its own effect on us. It’s as if there are planes of reality that have their own sounds, their own vibrations, and we do mantra to tune ourselves to those planes by tuning our own vibrations to theirs through the repetition of the sound of the mantra. That sound, or shabdh, is basically a spiritual sound, not a physical one—in the same way that the chakras are not physical things but spiritual loci of the various forms of energy of the body. The practice of shabdh yoga is a path for working with that inner sound.

Many of the holy books in various traditions have related sound to the creation of all form. In Hinduism, Om is said to be the root sound of the universe, the seed or bij syllable that manifests as creation. Or take the Bible: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word was made flesh.” We can imagine the act of creation occurring in just that way: Formlessness comes through the causal plane into idea, which is already a subtle sound, a sound of both words and images; and then it moves from there into more and more gross sound, including, ultimately, our bodies, which are in effect a form of gross vibration. (They have a sound, though we may not be able to hear it.)

As we purify our own consciousness by extricating ourselves from the grosser vibrational planes, we turn back toward the formless. The practice of mantra is a technique for tuning us to those subtler vibrational levels. As we move more and more deeply into mantra, the sound becomes the vehicle that allows us to experience both halves of the act of creation-and-return, so we’re going from the many back into the One, and then from the One into the many, all on the strength of the mantra.

Mechanical vibration alone won’t do it, of course. The mantra and the reciter of the mantra are not separate from one another, and the power and the effect of the mantra depend on the readiness and the openness and the faith of the one who’s doing it. In fact, mantras in and of themselves don’t do anything at all—it all has to do with the beings who work with them. Mantras aren’t magic spells; power mantras are just sounds, unless you’re the kind of person who has the one-pointedness of mind and the particular personality characteristics that make those power mantras work. That is, what a mantra does is to concentrate already-existing stuff in you. It just brings it into focus. It’s like a magnifying glass with the sun: The magnifying glass doesn’t have any heat in and of itself, but it takes the sunlight and focuses it; it makes it one-pointed. The mantra becomes like that magnifying glass for your consciousness.

Mantras can be used as a way of stilling thought as well as focusing it. If you imagine the mind as being like an ocean, with waves of thought surging along on it, waves going in all directions because of the crosscurrents of the tides and the winds—in that ocean, a mantra sets up a single wave pattern that gradually overrides all the other ones, until the mantra is the only thought-form left. Then there’s just one continuous wave going through your mind—going and going and going.

So say I’m driving along, I’m doing “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama.” There’s a billboard coming by, and that gets chomped into “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama.” I look down at the speedometer, and that becomes “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama.” I’m thinking, “Gee, maybe I’ll get a milk shake at the next restaurant,” and all the time I’m saying, “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama.” It’s all coming and passing, coming and passing, and it’s all being mantra-ized. It’s all being converted. It’s all being turned into God.

If you decide to try working with a mantra, which I would encourage you to do, start out by spending some time just getting familiar with the words and the sounds of it; work with that level until you feel comfortable saying the words out loud. Then, when you feel familiar with them, start to chant the mantra. As you chant, start to surrender into it; start to merge into it, start to offer up all of your other thoughts as sacrifice into it.

Let’s say you’re doing your mantra and this thought comes up: “I don’t think this is gonna work.” Take that thought, and in your imagination, place it on a golden tray, with a silk handkerchief and incense and a candle, and offer it to the mantra. Just keep doing the mantra while you offer your doubt to it. Keep offering up the mantra, and keep offering into the mantra. Offer your doubts, offer your discomforts, offer your boredom, offer your sore throat. Offer. Keep offering. And keep doing the mantra.

Ram Dass Distributing Malas: Assisted here by Maruti Projanski, Ram Dass gave each student a set of wooden beads and a thread from one of Maharajji’s blankets. The students strung the beads to make a mala, which they then used in their mantra practice.

There’s a book called The Way of a Pilgrim, which is about a very simple Russian peasant monk who recites mantra.² He’s doing the Jesus prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—as he’s walking through the bitter cold of the Russian winter, and he says, “I don’t feel that I’m walking at all. I am only aware of the fact that I’m saying the prayer. When the bitter cold pierces me, I begin to say my prayer more earnestly, and I quickly get warm all over. When hunger begins to overcome me, I call more often on the prayer, and I forget my wish for food. I have become a sort of half-conscious person. I have no cares and no interests.” That’s exactly the practice right there—offering each experience into the mantra, and watching the experiences get transformed.

In working with it, you’ll discover that mantra is esoteric; like any profound wisdom, it doesn’t disclose itself at first glance. Mantra’s not a surface thing; it goes to the depths of the mind, and so as we continue the practice, different stages unfold. At first you will do the mantra with your mouth. It’s on the tongue—that’s in your gross body: “Here I am doing this mantra.”

After some time, the mantra will start to move to your throat. When? It depends on your readiness, on how wide open you are to the mantra. Now you’re doing the mantra in the subtle body, or the dream body, as it’s sometimes called. When the mantra starts to enter your throat, you’re likely to notice changes entering your life, coming from the mantra. You might notice that your sleep becomes more blissful. You’ll feel a lightness in your body, and you’ll start to experience tremendous happiness within your heart. You’ll probably start to have visions of gods and goddesses and saints and siddhas. All those are qualities connected with that stage of the practice of mantra.

Then, after it’s been in your throat for a while, you’ll start to experience the mantra in your heart. Now it’s moving toward what’s called the causal body. You’ll start to feel new enthusiasm, a new kind of love for everything around you. It will reflect in your physical form; there’ll be a luster in your body. As the mantra starts to affect everything about you, you’ll find that you’re both more detached and yet more proficient in everything you do.

At a certain point, the repetition of mantra (or japa, as it’s called) becomes ajapa-japa, meaning that it’s going on, but you’re no longer doing it. The process is on automatic. At that point, as Kabir says, “Ram practices my japa, while I sit relaxed.” At that point you’re not doing the mantra anymore—the mantra is doing you. It’s a far-out moment when you notice that beginning to happen; at that point, there’s no weariness in it, no effort, no individuality. That’s the point where you’re approaching the merging into Brahman.

I invite you to select a mantra, and to start working with it, investing it for yourself. Choose whichever one feels right to you, or create one of your own, and start to practice with it. To start, you might pick a time when you can sit at your puja, or in some other quiet space, and recite the mantra aloud for one hour. That’s a good length of time to work with, for starters. By that time, you will have gone through many, many trips about the mantra. Let them all come and go. Offer them up, and stay with the mantra. Think it, do it, feel it, notice your reactions to it, sense it, experience it in your heart, think about its meaning—then forget about all that, and just keep doing the mantra. Just keep letting it move to level after level after level. And if you can empty yourself enough, when you stop doing it (if you can stop doing it), you will hear it being done in the universe all around you. Mantra is like a key that opens the door to a place in the universe. And since every sound that’s ever been made will always exist, the voices of everybody who ever did that mantra purely are still present in that place.

I experienced that place once, with a mantra. I’d done the mantra for a couple of days, and when I stopped, it suddenly sounded like I was surrounded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—thousands of voices in every direction, going back over time, all doing the mantra. I freaked completely! I thought that somebody was putting me on, that they had a radio going in the next room or something. I couldn’t believe that I had tuned in to that other space, where that mantra is always being chanted.

So I suggest that it could be useful for you to experiment with the practice of mantra. And I suggest that it could be useful for you to experiment with the practice of sacrifice. Both of them, mantra and sacrifice, represent ways of turning our lives into offerings. There is a deep yearning within us to complete the wheel of sacrifice, to close the circle, and through our sacrifice to merge with Brahman, to merge with the void. Sacrifice and mantra are ways we sacralize our lives, ways we make manifest our yearning to be free, and in doing that, they make us coconspirators in our own dissolution.

As I witness my own life more and more as an offering, other things in my life have less of a pull on me. Doing it for me isn’t nearly as interesting as surrendering it outward . . . upward . . . inward. Maharajji named me “Ram Dass,” and Ram Dass means “servant of God,” meaning that my life is offered in service to the One. Somebody says to me, “Why do you need a weird name like that? Do you have to have an Indian name? Can’t you just be Dick Alpert?” Sure. I could be. But having a name like Ram Dass is very functional, because it keeps reminding me of something all the time . . . “Ram Dass = Servant of God.” Somebody says, “Ram Dass,” and I hear, “Servant of God,” and that immediately reminds me what my trip is all about— that it’s about this process of service and sacrifice and transformation.

Sometimes when I was with Maharajji, he would say something to Ram Dass and I would be busy being Dick Alpert, and I would feel like he was talking to somebody over my shoulder. Maybe he was talking to who I will be when I cease to be who I think I am. And when I become that, then all my acts will be designed to transform my own being—and everybody else’s as well.

The ultimate offering we make is the sacrifice of our own personal trips, of all the things we think we are: our bodies, our personalities, our senses, our feelings. And then, with the growing freedom that that brings, comes a deeper recognition of the Brahman, of that which lies behind, of that which is non-self, of that which is the source from which it all keeps feeding outward.

And with the full recognition of that spiritual root of the universe, sacrifice takes on yet another aspect: It becomes the sacrifice of form itself, the sacrifice of all worldly vibration, the sacrifice of all life and existence as we know it, into the Spirit. It’s as if we are pouring it all into the mouth of Brahman, into the fire that is Brahman. We’re pouring it inward, pouring it inward, and all our efforts, every act of our lives, becomes that single offering. We are, in effect, turning ourselves inside out, until finally we are the atman, we are the light within, we are the consciousness, we are the spaciousness, we are the presence, we are the . . . ahhhhhhh!