Chanting Mantras

I purify my body

By chanting God’s Name.

I purify my vital

By serving God.

I purify my mind

By emptying my mind for God.

I purify my heart

By meditating on God’s Compassion-Love.

Repeating divine qualities. Please inwardly repeat the word ‘love, love, love’ most soulfully. While uttering ‘love’ most soulfully, please try to feel that this word is reverberating in the inmost recesses of your heart: ‘love, love, love’.

If you care more for the concept of peace, divine peace, then please chant the word ‘peace’ inwardly, or repeat it to yourself. Try to hear the sound, the cosmic sound that embodies that word. The word ‘peace’ will be a seed-sound reverberating in the very depths of your heart. If you want light, then please repeat the word ‘light, light, light.’ While uttering the word, chanting or soulfully repeating it, please feel that you have become that word or divine quality. Feel that your very existence, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head, has become love, or the quality you are repeating. All your nerves, your subtle body, your physical body, everything, everything is flooded with love. The quality has that magic power. Love, peace, light, delight: you choose the divine quality which you wish to embody and become.

Repeat ‘Aum’ or ‘Supreme’. If you cannot enter into your deepest meditation because your mind is restless, this is an opportunity to utilise a mantra. You can repeat ‘Supreme’ or ‘Aum’ or ‘God’ for a few minutes.

Loudly or softly. There are many ways to chant ‘Aum’. If you chant it loudly, you feel the Omnipotence of the Supreme. When you chant it softly, you feel the Delight of the Supreme. When you chant it silently, you feel the Peace of the Supreme. When we chant ‘Aum’ with tremendous soul’s power, what we actually do is enter into the cosmic vibration where the creation is in perfect harmony and where the Cosmic Dance is being danced by the Absolute.

Please practise it aloud, not silently. Let the sound of the mantra vibrate even in your physical ears and permeate your entire body. This will convince your outer mind and give you a greater sense of joy and achievement. When chanting out loud, the ‘m’ sound should last at least three times as long as the ‘Au’ sound.

Life-energy entering the crown chakra. When you chant ‘Aum’, please feel that life-energy, divine energy, is entering into you through your crown centre. The breath that you breathe in through the nose is very limited; but if you can imagine that there is a big hole in the top of your head and that life-energy, cosmic energy, is entering into your body through that big hole, then naturally you will be able to accelerate your purification and increase your aspiration and hunger for God, truth, light and bliss.

When my consciousness

Is at the top of my head

And going even beyond,

I know that I am finally reaching

My highest height.

Start with five hundred times. If you want to achieve overall purification of your nature, then japa [repetition of a mantra] can be most effective. But you have to do it in a systematic way, step by step. Today repeat ‘Aum’ or ‘Supreme’ or whatever mantra your Master has given you five hundred times. Then tomorrow repeat it six hundred times, the day after tomorrow, seven hundred, and so on, until you reach twelve hundred in one week’s time. Then begin descending each day until you reach five hundred again. In this way you can climb up the tree and climb down the tree.

Please continue this exercise, week by week, for a month. Whether you want to change your name or not, the world will give you a new name: ‘Purity’. Some of my students have done this exercise and they have achieved, I must say, considerable purification of their nature and their emotional problems.

Japa in small segments. If it is difficult for you to do this exercise at one stretch, then you can do it in pieces. You can do it ten times; each time you will repeat the mantra only fifty times. You know that during the day you want to drink ten glasses of water. But if you drink all ten glasses of water at once, you are afraid it will upset your stomach; so you will not drink them all at once. But if you drink one glass now, and then after an interval of an hour or two, another glass, easily you can drink ten glasses of water.

So here also, instead of chanting ‘Aum’ five hundred times all at once, early in the morning you can repeat it fifty times. Then, in an hour’s time, you try another fifty. So each hour if you repeat ‘Aum’ fifty times, each time it will not take you more than a minute or two. Since you can easily spend two minutes in an hour, you can do it.

If you have a mantra or incantation of your own, you can easily do it fifty times an hour. It cannot take more than two or three minutes, and everyone can offer three minutes to God. It is not how many hours you can do it at a time that is important, but how soulfully you can do it.

As fast as possible. If you get an attack on the emotional vital plane and wrong thoughts or wrong vibrations are entering into you, you can repeat ‘Aum’ or the Name of the Supreme. In this case try to do it as fast as possible. When you are trying to cleanse your mind of impurities, you must chant as if you were running to catch a moving train. During regular japa, however, just say the mantra in a normal but soulful way, but do not prolong it too much; otherwise, you will not have time to chant the five hundred or six hundred times that are necessary.

Times of day. Even if you received your mantra, japa and meditation all from the same Master, you should practise them at three different times of the day, because the forces of these practices do not go together. In the morning, if you want to, you can chant a specific mantra, in the evening you can do japa and at some other time you can do meditation. Otherwise, while you are meditating, if you suddenly get the inspiration to do japa or to chant some specific mantra, you will only ruin your aspiration. Japa and mantras have their own significant power, but in the highest type of meditation, when your inner being is communing with God, at that time there is no thought, no idea; your mind is calm and quiet, so there should be no mantra or japa there.

Chanting your spiritual name. In my own case, I do not emphasise the importance of mantras for those following my path. But if a student of mine does want to practise a mantra, I tell him that he can repeat the Name of God—‘Supreme’—or he can chant ‘Aum’. Again, if he does not care to repeat these divine words, he can chant his own soul’s name. To some students I have given spiritual names, soul’s names. If you can repeat your own soul’s name, I assure you that you will be able to bring to the fore all your divine qualities and to become energised with divine power. If you repeat even ten times very slowly the spiritual name I have given you, then a new and fruitful consciousness will dawn in you.

The Gayatri mantra. In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna says that the Gayatri mantra is the best of all the mantras:

Aum bhur bhuvah svah

Tat savitur varenyam

Bhargo devasya dhimahi

Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat

Its meaning is:

We meditate on the transcendental glory

of the Deity Supreme,

Who is inside the heart of the earth,

Inside the life of the sky,

And inside the soul of the Heaven.

May He stimulate and illumine our minds.

By repeating this mantra, hundreds and hundreds of seekers have attained to spiritual perfection. If you can repeat it soulfully thousands of times at a stretch, you are bound to get at least an iota of inner illumination. But it has to be done most soulfully, and not like a child learning something by rote.