Healing Mantras: Using Sound Affirmations for Personal Power, Creativity, and Healing
Autor Thomas Ashley-Farrand, Thom Ashley-Farranden Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 iul 1999
Mantras, or simple chants, are short phrases packed with energy and intention--specifically designed to generate powerful sound waves that promote healing, insight, creativity, and spiritual growth. Healing Mantras is the practical, how-to guide that makes the strengths and benefits of mantras available to everyone. The transformative power of sound has been passed down to the present from the sages of India, the classical scientists of ancient Greece, and the medieval monks of Europe. Mantras, sounds, and chants have inspired, comforted, and mended the lives of individuals, religious orders, and even entire cultures. Even though the science and discipline of chanting and formal prayer are practiced in every religion around the world, this is the first time that ancient Sanskrit mantras have been explained and adapted to Western needs.
One of the few Western experts in Hindu and Buddhist mantras, Thomas Ashley-Farrand has practiced mantra-based spiritual disciplines for twenty-five years. In this illuminating book, he explains how and why mantras work and shows how to use them for everything from controlling habits to overcoming fear, from curing specific ailments to finding inner peace. In each of the more than fifty mantras, all translated from the original Sanskrit, Ashley-Farrand unlocks the power of every word, explains its appropriate application, and tells you how to pronounce it in easy-to-follow phonetic symbols. Inside, you'll find mantras for
- Health - Worldly Success - Habit Control - Protection - Grief - Anger - Controlling Fear - Personal Attraction - Wisdom - Concentration and Mental Clarity - Healing Life Issues - and more!
These mantras can be repeated aloud or in silence and can be used by people of any religion or spiritual practice, "as you wash dishes, as you drive on the freeway, as you meditate, or as you cook." Sound can help and sound can heal, and Healing Mantras now makes this sound medicine available to everyone.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780345431707
ISBN-10: 0345431707
Pagini: 256
Dimensiuni: 141 x 210 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.22 kg
Ediția:Revised
Editura: BALLANTINE BOOKS
ISBN-10: 0345431707
Pagini: 256
Dimensiuni: 141 x 210 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.22 kg
Ediția:Revised
Editura: BALLANTINE BOOKS
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Notă biografică
Thomas Ashley-Farrand has practiced mantra-based spiritual disciplines for twenty-five years and is an expert in the use of Eastern mantras, including Hindu, Buddhist, and Tibetan. He teaches Sanskrit mantra and meditation at Chaffee College in Ontario, California, and lives in San Gabriel. His Web site is at www.sanskritmantra.com
Extras
In spiritual and religious traditions all over the world, spiritual states are equated with light. A common spiritual objective is "enlightenment." In the everyday language of spiritual development, we seek "light on the path" so that we may safely make our way. For centuries, artists from diverse traditions have made use of light in depicting great spiritual teachers. A clear indicator of spiritual power, light surrounds the priests of the Ark of the Covenant and creates the nimbus of the saints, and halos of Christ and the Buddha. In the first few verses of Genesis we read, "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." Yet if we imagine that light is the highest expression of spiritual power, we are mistaken. The spirit is created and animated not by light, but by sound.
Looking more closely at Genesis we see, "God said ..." The light of divine creation was initiated by sound. The speech of God, according to Genesis, was the source of the spiritual light to which we all aspire.
The New Testament Gospel of John, which was written thousands of years after Genesis, opens with the verse, "In the beginning was the Word ..." The beginning was not light; rather, it was sound in the form of the divine speech. Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament contains a verse such as "And God made light to shine." Rather, God creates the phenomenon by speaking of it. The primary mechanism of creation is sound.
In the wisdom of the ancient East, we find the same teaching. The whole universe comes about when God decides to manifest reality through the power of divine speech. In some Eastern texts, this power is referred to as Saraswati--the Word.
Sir John Woodroffe's The Garland of Letters includes a translation of a scripture called the Sata patha Brahmana, written many thousands of years ago. Volume 6 of that scripture opens:
In the beginning was God with power through speech. God said, "May I be many ... may I be propagated." And by his will expressed through subtle speech, he united himself with that speech and became pregnant. Prajapathi and Saraswati were then created. And Prajapathi is called the progenitor of all beings.
This statement sounds astonishingly similar to the idea of creation expressed in Genesis and the opening text of the Gospel of John.
A Brief Vedic Cosmology
Vedic religion, handed down for millennia through an oral tradition before the advent of writing, presents a concise summary of how the cosmos came about. Creation began with Being, a state so sublime and so different from anything we can conceive of that it can only be expressed in metaphors, allegories, and pictures. One of the most common representations of Being is the Hindu divinity Narayana, who floats in a sea of inky black. From the solar plexus of the sleeping Narayana springs another entity called Brahma.
As Narayana sleeps and Brahma is formed, the universe is conceived as a divine idea. Unmanifest, this universe is vague and unformed. But Being has moved to Mind, which is Brahma. This mind of Brahma, however, is not static but dynamic. It soon experiences Desire, which is quickly followed by Will. Desire and Will cause Brahma to call upon his power--Saraswati, the Divine Speech of manifestation. Saraswati is described as a feminine principle. She is "the Word" as understood in the Vedic tradition. When Brahma calls upon his power, when he calls upon Saraswati, the universe comes into being with all the forces that will animate it for billions of years to come.
The process of creation, then, is described through the images of a brief narrative:
First, God as Being ...
From Being comes Mind ...
From Mind comes Desire ...
From Desire comes Will ...
From Will comes the Word ...
From the Word comes everything else.
Other Eastern texts express the same idea. Kuan Yin in Chinese Buddhism is referred to as "the divine voice," which calls forth the illusive form of the universe out of the seven elements. The Vedas speak of the divine sound-current Shabda Brahma, which permeates all and is a key to creation.
References in sacred texts to the power of sound are not limited to creation myths. In the Old Testament book of Exodus, the sound of trumpets is said to bring down the walls of Jericho. In the East, the trumpet sound is a symbol of great spiritual power associated with insight and elevated consciousness. The sound of the trumpet is thought to be "heard" or perceived through the third eye--a point between the eyebrows--which can have direct communication with the Divine.
More recent texts and teachers echo this ancient idea. Mystic Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan has written, "Divine sound is the cause of all manifestation. The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe." In the early part of the twentieth century, H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, wrote in The Secret Doctrine, "Sound is a tremendous occult [hidden] power. It is such a stupendous force that the electricity generated by a million Niagaras could never counteract even the smallest potentiality when directed by proper knowledge."
This last statement leads to the idea that the great power of sound that created the universe is also accessible to humanity. Scattered through various religious traditions, we find references to the divine power of words. The Latin word cantare, root of the English "cantor," is commonly translated as "to sing." However, some linguists believe that the original meaning was "to produce by magic." The Mexican Huichol Indians use the Spanish word cantor, "singer," to mean "shaman"--a clear indication of the power they attribute to the voice. Another Latin word, carmen, is often translated as "poem," but originally it meant "magic formula."* (*In Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, by Joachim-Ernst Berendt.)
Mystics' and Scientists' Views
Some scientists, too, have recognized the power of sound and sound waves, which are sometimes organized and expressed as music. The sixteenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, "God was master of cosmic sound, causing the planets to leave their entirely circular orbits and to adopt consciously complicated elliptical orbits in order to produce ever more beautiful music." Kepler viewed the orbits of the planets as vibrations, the Music of the Spheres.
Some two thousand years earlier, the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras noted, "The seven heavens sounded each one vowel down to earth and became the creation of all things that be on earth." This statement could almost have come directly from a text of the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, in which the power of vowels is said to be divine. And the ancient rishis (sages) of India arrived at the same conclusion, teaching that the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the vibration of the five inner planets:
O Venus
A Jupiter
E Saturn
I Mars
U Mercury
Ravi Shankar, the contemporary master of the classical music of India, refers to the sound of God's power as Nada Brahma, the divine sound that reverberates through the universe and the "subtle human body" we all carry with us. Shankar states, "Our tradition teaches us that sound is God. Music is a spiritual discipline that raises one's inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss. We are taught to work toward a fundamental goal of the knowledge of the unchanging and eternal essence of the universe. Our music reveals the essence of the universe it reflects. Through music, one can reach God." Elsewhere he writes, "Saint musicians such as Baiju Bavare, Swami Haridas or Mian Tan Sen performed miracles by performing certain Ragas [classical Indian compositions]. It is said that some could light fires or oil lamps by singing one raga, or bring rain, or melt stones, cause flowers to bloom, and attract ferocious wild animals to a peaceful quiet circle around their singing."
In Joachim-Ernst Berendt's Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, astronomers Jeff Lightman and Robert M. Sickels describe fascinating sounds in their experiments with radio astronomy: "The edge of the galaxy becomes a noisy hissing cacophony of sound produced by quick shifts in molecular and atomic energy levels.... The giant planet Jupiter produces its own peculiar noise: huge rapid sighs like the intense roaring of a distant surge, triggered by Jovian electricity from storms of such intensity as to be worthy of the god whose name the planet bears. The sun makes noises too, hisses and crackling in quietude and roars of alarming intensity when it spews out giant portions of matter into space."
Rudolf Kippenhahn, director of the Max Planck Research Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, also wrote about the sound of the planets and objects of the heavens: "We hear the heterodyne ticking of pulsars ... high energy pulses from spherical star clusters, with sequences which repeat themselves. In space, there is ticking, drumming, humming and crackling."
The great rhythms of the cosmos are also revealed through modern physics. In The Silent Pulse, George Leonard writes about the vastness of space that composes what we call matter: "We can see the fully crystalline structure of muscle fiber, waving like wheat in the wind, pulsing many trillions of times a second.... As we move closer to the nucleus, it begins to dissolve. It too is nothing more than an oscillating field [that] upon our approach dissolves into pure rhythm.... Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the heart of the world, there is no solidarity, there is only dance."
The power of sound, the power of music, the power of vowels, and the power of speech are the great creative forces of the universe: as custodians of these, human beings possess tremendous spiritual power. For centuries, mystical scriptures and teachers of the East have taught mantra as a means for harnessing this power.
The Mantra Toolbox
Mantra is a Sanskrit word with many shades of meaning: "tool of the mind," "divine speech," and "language of the human spiritual physiology" are just a few of these. In the context of this book, mantra is a tool for healing problems that we all face in life. As the mystic Sufi master Vilayat Inayat Khan states, "The practice of mantra actually kneads the flesh of the body with sound. The delicate cells of the elaborate bundles of nerves are subjected to a constant hammering, a seizure of the flesh by the vibrations of divine sound."
Mantra can help you feel more peaceful or more energized. It can help you cope with illness and it can sometimes help effect physical healing. It can help you deal with difficult or unpleasant circumstances, by helping you to see a course of action, or it can give you the patience and perspective to just "wait it out." It can help you bring your wishes to fruition and create reality from your dreams. Mantra is a dynamic, individual, nonviolent way to approach conditions you wish to change. They are ancient formulas of divine sounds recorded by the ancient sages of India and held in trust and in secret for ages in both India and Tibet.
But mantra is not a panacea. It is not usually the only way or even the best way to solve human problems. Your life and your karma--the accumulated effect of all your thoughts and actions over many lives--are far too complex to be completely mastered by several weeks of work with spiritual formulas, no matter how powerful they might be. But mantra can completely solve many of the problems we face, and it can considerably soften others.
Life and Desires
Mantra can help you deal with the material concerns and necessities of life. All of us want or need something, or wish to make changes in our lives. Some of us want a mate. Others desire a new job or career. Many of us have faced health problems or know someone who has. People struggle with financial woes and the many life transitions. We have desires that can be as simple as a new car or as complicated as smoothing out some tangled family mess.
Many of us also want help in managing our emotions and inner lives. We encounter situations that produce knee-jerk reactions that we would like to prevent. We become frustrated, sad, angry, jealous. Sometimes our responses can be more problematic than the situations that caused them. A few words spoken in anger can do harm on a grand scale to a friendship or love relationship. Depression can become so severe that it drives everyone and everything from us. Longings and obsessions isolate us. Mantra practice can help you gain clarity about your life, your purpose, and yourself.
Sometimes we would just like to be able to help others, but we may not know exactly how to help. A family member or coworker may be in some difficulty, or we would like to be able to make a contribution to the good of our neighborhood or the world--if only we knew what to do. Mantra can help you find the right course of action for effective change.
The relatively simple tool of mantra can help you with all the conditions and challenges you need to face. Even though mantra is ancient in origin, you can apply it to virtually any contemporary issue with good results.
The Mantra Stockpiles
Modern scholars and Vedic priests differ about the age of mantra writings. Some scholars date the earliest written records of the four Vedic scriptures to 1000 b.c.e., although the oldest written version of the Rig Veda in existence dates from only the fourteenth century c.e. Yet in The Principal Upanishads, the respected scholar S. Radhakrishnan, quoting from Bloomfield's The Religion of the Vedas, states, "The Vedas are not only the most ancient literary monument of India, but also the most ancient literature of the Indo-European peoples, earlier than that of Greece or Israel."* (*Although Bloomfield's Religion of the Vedas (published in 1908) is referred to three times over the course of this massive 950-page book, his first name and other publishing information are not provided.) The earliest hymns and mantras contained in the Rig Veda are traditionally considered to date back to 1500 b.c.e. and possibly even to before 4000 b.c.e.
Hindu priests emphatically assert that mantra writings are much older than academic authorities believe. The popularly accepted history of mantra, which even today is conveyed through an oral tradition taught in Hindu temples, places the earliest writing at the time of the Mahabharata, some three thousand years before Christ. And Sanskrit mantras existed at least two thousand years before that in myth, story, and legend.
The Vedic teachings were originally reserved for the priest class, and its rituals, as well as the Vedas themselves and the mantras contained within them, were transmitted orally for thousands of years. After passing orally from generation to generation, Sanskrit mantras were first written on palm leaves so that they could be preserved. The first "librarians" were families who dedicated themselves to preserving these mantra writings. Cataloged by subject, application, and outcome, the mantras were meticulously stored and sheltered from the elements. When the palm leaves became brittle or moldy, the mantras were recopied onto fresh leaves while they were still legible.
As the stockpile of mantras became larger and larger, even whole families could not keep up with the recopying needed to maintain the library. For keeping abreast of the ever-accumulating new mantra information, summaries of some sections were created. These summaries condensed whole shelves of subject material down to a handful of leaves. This worked for several centuries until the stockpile again grew too large. Then the contents were summarized again. More hundreds and hundreds of years passed until the whole cycle was repeated once again. Throughout the several thousand years during which the summaries were being compiled, certain sections were considered so important that they were never summarized, but remained intact.
These Hindu teachings of inspiration and insight followed a similar path from oral transmission to transcription in Sanskrit. The Upanishads are the summaries of the summaries of the summaries of teachings created many thousands of years ago. The Upanishads contain the Forest Cantos, or Aranyakas, and the Brahmanas, which are fragments of larger, lost works. The four Vedas survived nearly untouched and unsummarized: Rig Veda, Artharva Veda, Yajur Veda, and Sama Veda. In a sense, the Vedas and the Upanishads are all collections of Sanskrit mantras linked together and intended to convey timeless ideas on a wide range of subjects.
The amount of information contained even in these fragmented summaries is staggering. A whole system of medicine is contained in the Artharva Veda--a system that Western medicine has only recently begun to acknowledge as valid. In the Rig Veda, spiritual matters of cosmology and individual development are set forth in grand mystical phrases and practices. Between 1000 b.c.e. and the end of the first Christian millennium, sages, scholars, and mystics such as Patañjali (200 b.c.e.), Shankaracharya (800 a.d.), and others presented even more specific practices for spiritual development and solutions to problems. It is from these teachings that Sanskrit acquired the title Deva Lingua, or "language of the gods," which connotes that even mortals can commune with the gods and become like them: powerful and immortal. The first requirement, however, is to learn to "speak the language" and thereby use the power it contains. Mantra is the language through which we invoke the gods and their energy.
Deva Lingua
While mantras, the Vedas, and the Upanishads are all written in Sanskrit, this language is no longer spoken in everyday conversation. Because Sanskrit is not spoken widely among the general population of any country, it is technically classified a "dead" language. Yet all Hindu religious practices and traditions are taught, conducted, and transmitted in Sanskrit. Most Buddhist practices that use the spoken word still contain the bulk of their material in Sanskrit. All of the swamis and teachers from India who have come to the West use systems of personal development derived from Sanskrit texts. So, to call Sanskrit a dead language does not take into account the daily practices of many millions of people.
Moreover, many Western languages can trace their roots to Sanskrit, which dictionaries often classify as Indo-European. Sanskrit truly deserves its other title, the Mother of Tongues, as scholars describe it. In Sanskrit, mata is "mother" and pitra is "father"; these are obviously close to the Latin mater and pater. The Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, and Romanian) derive from Latin, which is itself derived from Sanskrit, which was spoken for many centuries before Latin came into existence.
The Experiment
Over the years, I have learned many mantras for solving life's problems. To give you some idea of how this can work, I'd like to tell you how a mantra helped me through a particularly difficult time.
In 1980, many things changed for me. For eight years, I had been priest-in-residence at a spiritual center affiliated with a group in India, but based in Washington, D.C. I enjoyed being of service, and my responsibilities by and large were pleasant. However, the conduct of the organization's Indian leader was making me more and more uncomfortable, because he was behaving inappropriately regarding issues of sex, money, and power. I vacillated between staying and leaving, and the worry was enervating.
One day, in one of my usual two-hour meditation sessions, I saw a clock that read a quarter to twelve. I was shown that at twelve o'clock, the relationship I had long been seeking would arrive. I resolved to wait awhile before coming to a decision about leaving the center. As it turned out, those fifteen minutes took more than six months in real-world time. After six months, a woman named Margalo arrived at the organization. Within two weeks, I had left the center to move in with her. One year later we were married, and we decided to leave the organization altogether.
When I had first become involved with the organization, I was working as a television producer. Fairly soon after joining, I had become a full-time instructor in broadcasting at George Washington University. In 1980, however, my non-tenure-track contract was up and, newly married, I was considering my professional options. Margalo suggested we leave Washington, D.C., for her former home in southern California. I saw no reason to refuse. Once there, I knew I would have to develop a new career for myself. But despite all my efforts to find a job in Los Angeles, the media capital of the Western world, doors in broadcasting remained closed, and I was forced to take temporary jobs. I struggled to create some kind of balance between my discouraging search for a profession and my new, happy life with my wife.
During my years as a priest, I had used Sanskrit mantras almost exclusively in meditations to strengthen my focus and to foster spiritual insights. For any secular problem, I would return to prayers that I had learned from my Judeo-Christian upbringing in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Using mantras does not mean you have to leave your present religious organization or your roots or abandon other spiritual practices. While I still consider myself a Christian, I have explored many religious traditions, and over the years I have added other spiritual observances of Hindu and Buddhist origins to my daily practices to form a personal spirituality and practice of compassion and service. Mantra is a wonderfully effective complementary spiritual practice that can enrich your life.
In any case, the results I had obtained from prayers were sporadic, but I had accepted them. At this low point in my professional life, however, I decided to apply a mantra to my situation to see if it would help me. I chose a mantra that seemed appropriate for my difficulties in the material world, and I decided to work with it for forty days. I chose a forty-day practice because forty is a recurrent number in religious literature. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days. Noah tossed upon the seas for forty days. Moses wandered through the desert for forty years. The Buddha provided a variation by sitting under the Bodhi Tree for forty-three days until he achieved enlightenment. In Vedic Hinduism, forty days is the standard length for a concentrated mantra discipline. In Roman Catholicism, the novena, a daily discipline of prayer employed by the faithful to seek help in solving life's problems, is sometimes observed for five days, forty days, and fifty-four days, although it is traditionally done for n
ine days.
I figured that I needed a significant amount of time for my mantra practice to influence whatever forces were preventing me from finding a job. The intention I formed in my mind was to find a steady job in which I could make a contribution to others, and from which I could receive a living wage. Since many problem-solving mantras are general in nature, the mantra I selected was one for removal of obstacles:
Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha
(om gum guh-nuh-puh-tuh-yei nahm-ah-ha)
"Om and salutations to the remover of obstacles
for which Gum is the seed."
Among Vedic and Hindu sects, this mantra (which will be discussed in chapter 5) is universally acknowledged as supremely effective for clearing away obstacles of all sorts. Since I did not know what was preventing me from finding steady, gainful employment, my goal was to remove any obstacle, internal or external, spiritual or physical, standing between me and the right kind of job.
For the next forty days, I repeated the mantra as much as I could, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. While performing household chores, I would chant the mantra. While driving, I would chant it in my car. While eating or preparing food, I chanted it. When falling off into sleep I would keep the mantra going as long as I could. Upon waking, I would immediately begin chanting the mantra. If I was with other people, I would chant silently. If I was alone, I would chant softly out loud. I became an Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha chanting machine.
I liked the way the mantra made me feel. The rhythm of it quickly settled into my consciousness, and I found that after two weeks the mantra would start by itself if I was otherwise engaged. Waking up in the middle of the night, I could hear it faintly going on in some rear compartment of my mind. It agreed with my body and mind as if it were a nutritious, spiritual food.
After three weeks of working with the mantra, I was called upon to perform a Vedic ceremony for a group in Santa Ana. The ceremony lasted about an hour, and when it was over I circulated among the guests to chat and munch on snacks. With one small group, the conversation eventually got around to "And what do you do for a living?" I somewhat awkwardly explained that I was new to the West Coast and had not settled into any one thing yet.
After further conversation, one of the women in the group said that her company was looking for someone to help with a marketing project for the next three months. I inquired about the kind of work they did and she replied that it was a medical care facility that performed family practice, occupational medicine, and urgent care. I knew nothing about the health care field and said so.
Undeterred, the woman pressed me to call her and schedule an appointment for the next week. I assented, mostly out of courtesy and a sense that I should explore every possibility--but without any real hope of finding employment.
When I arrived for my appointment, I was met by my acquaintance's boss, Rick, who interviewed me for about ten minutes. I believed I was sunk because I showed no real understanding of their industry, but much to my surprise he finished his short interview with, "I think you will work out just fine. But I need to get the docs to sign off on it. Please wait here."
The doctors approved me and within minutes I had filled out some paperwork and become their clinic marketing representative performing fieldwork on a three-month temporary assignment. The pay was modest, but it beat temporary work or waiting by the phone, so I was grateful. All the while, I kept chanting the mantra silently inside.
After several days of making business calls, I learned enough to realize that the marketing materials I had to support my calls were just terrible. I couldn't banish this realization from my mind, and I began to feel more and more foolish as I made the calls. Finally, I had to do something.
At this point, I was on day thirty of my forty-day chanting discipline. That night, I reworked everything into three new pieces, using the colors of the building and the familiar caduceus medical symbol. When I arrived at the office the next morning, I sought out the doctor to whom I reported and briefly showed him what I had in mind. He stopped dead, looked at me, and said to meet him in the conference room in one hour. When I entered the conference room there was Rick, along with the woman who had suggested I apply for the job, the doctor who had interviewed me, and two other doctors who were partners at the facility. Unsettled, I realized that I was about to give a presentation. The doctor who had called the meeting said, "Show us what you've got."
After my ten-minute impromptu presentation, the docs asked me to leave the room for a few minutes. I nervously complied. When I was asked back in, my boss said, "Congratulations, you're our new marketing director. Get yourself some cards printed and also get this new stuff you designed printed as soon as possible." I was in shock, but still going on inside was Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha.
I finished out my forty-day mantra discipline without further incident. Within the next thirty days I was involved in a joint marketing project with a local hospital. The nurse who was the hospital's marketing director was friendly and technically very skilled. We worked well together. When we were nearly finished with the project, she asked if I would mind telling what they paid me. I did not mind, and told her. She wrinkled up her face and said, "They're getting you cheap."
After the joint project was finished, my boss congratulated us both on a job well done. After shaking his hand, the nurse motioned toward me and said, "You know this guy is wa-a-a-a-y underpaid. You better be careful or someone will make him an offer and he'll get away from you." I was flabbergasted, but my boss responded like a pro in every way. He grinned and said, "Don't you worry, we'll take good care of him." Within thirty days I had a 40 percent raise.
That was early in 1983. I stayed with this company for nearly seven years. I had numerous raises and felt I was appreciated for my work. I finally left when my supervisor decided to form his own company and made me an offer to join him.
I attributed my successful job search to my mantra discipline. Its effectiveness made a huge impression upon me, and I had a new appreciation for the power of spiritual formulas in solving everyday difficulties. I began to recommend mantras to others for their problems and they worked amazingly well.
I gave this same mantra to a friend of mine in Washington, D.C., who had just retired from a career in the Army. He had studied gemology and desired to find a job in that field. After searching for months in many cities, however, he was unable to find the work he wanted. I recommended that he begin chanting Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha as much as he could for ten days. On the eleventh day, I performed an energy-cleansing ceremony on his behalf. Within three days he had several job offers and was well-started on his new career.
As another example of how mantras can be used to help us cope with problems in our daily lives, a friend of mine, Rae, was bothered by terrible neighbors across the street and next door. Those across the street would intentionally park in front of her house, blocking her driveway and making it impossible for her to get out, or for the trash haulers to pick up her garbage. Although she had called the police, they could only help her from time to time. The neighbors next to her were constantly noisy and resisted any request for consideration. Rae asked for my help and I gave her this mantra:
Narasimha Ta Va Da So Hum
(nah-rah-seem-ha tah vah dah soh hoom)
Narasimha invokes the energy for destroying the seemingly indestructible. Ta, Va, and Da invoke energies of the body and direct the energy the mantra creates to accomplish the highest good. So Hum is a mantra unto itself; it puts the mind in tune with the divine self within.
Rae began to chant this mantra many times every day. She quickly grew fond of the mantra, which felt good to her, and it helped her feel strong and positive in the face of her neighbors' disruptions. After about two months, her noisy neighbors sold their house and moved away. As of this writing, the neighbors across the street are gone a good deal of the time and the problem with them has lessened considerably. This mantra is also helping her build inner strength for her career in service to others.
Chanting a Sanskrit mantra alone did not land me my job with the medical clinic, but it helped me approach new possibilities and a new career with positive expectations. I believe that our mantras also helped my friends and me to maintain a calm and peaceful state of mind and body so that we were receptive to insights about how best to work through the challenges that presented themselves. Mantra practice also provided me with the energy and concentration to accomplish what I needed to do, and the inner confidence to make a worthwhile contribution in a field about which I had previously known nothing. It was the catalyst for a cascade of positive transformations and developments in my and my friends' lives.
In Healing Mantras, I catalog the success of my students and friends in their use of mantras. The book is intended to provide you with a toolbox of mantras to correct and heal various conditions in your life. These spiritual formulas can also help you create abundance, unlock creative power within you, and aid in manifesting a fuller life in every way. It is my prayer that you will succeed beyond all your expectations.
Looking more closely at Genesis we see, "God said ..." The light of divine creation was initiated by sound. The speech of God, according to Genesis, was the source of the spiritual light to which we all aspire.
The New Testament Gospel of John, which was written thousands of years after Genesis, opens with the verse, "In the beginning was the Word ..." The beginning was not light; rather, it was sound in the form of the divine speech. Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament contains a verse such as "And God made light to shine." Rather, God creates the phenomenon by speaking of it. The primary mechanism of creation is sound.
In the wisdom of the ancient East, we find the same teaching. The whole universe comes about when God decides to manifest reality through the power of divine speech. In some Eastern texts, this power is referred to as Saraswati--the Word.
Sir John Woodroffe's The Garland of Letters includes a translation of a scripture called the Sata patha Brahmana, written many thousands of years ago. Volume 6 of that scripture opens:
In the beginning was God with power through speech. God said, "May I be many ... may I be propagated." And by his will expressed through subtle speech, he united himself with that speech and became pregnant. Prajapathi and Saraswati were then created. And Prajapathi is called the progenitor of all beings.
This statement sounds astonishingly similar to the idea of creation expressed in Genesis and the opening text of the Gospel of John.
A Brief Vedic Cosmology
Vedic religion, handed down for millennia through an oral tradition before the advent of writing, presents a concise summary of how the cosmos came about. Creation began with Being, a state so sublime and so different from anything we can conceive of that it can only be expressed in metaphors, allegories, and pictures. One of the most common representations of Being is the Hindu divinity Narayana, who floats in a sea of inky black. From the solar plexus of the sleeping Narayana springs another entity called Brahma.
As Narayana sleeps and Brahma is formed, the universe is conceived as a divine idea. Unmanifest, this universe is vague and unformed. But Being has moved to Mind, which is Brahma. This mind of Brahma, however, is not static but dynamic. It soon experiences Desire, which is quickly followed by Will. Desire and Will cause Brahma to call upon his power--Saraswati, the Divine Speech of manifestation. Saraswati is described as a feminine principle. She is "the Word" as understood in the Vedic tradition. When Brahma calls upon his power, when he calls upon Saraswati, the universe comes into being with all the forces that will animate it for billions of years to come.
The process of creation, then, is described through the images of a brief narrative:
First, God as Being ...
From Being comes Mind ...
From Mind comes Desire ...
From Desire comes Will ...
From Will comes the Word ...
From the Word comes everything else.
Other Eastern texts express the same idea. Kuan Yin in Chinese Buddhism is referred to as "the divine voice," which calls forth the illusive form of the universe out of the seven elements. The Vedas speak of the divine sound-current Shabda Brahma, which permeates all and is a key to creation.
References in sacred texts to the power of sound are not limited to creation myths. In the Old Testament book of Exodus, the sound of trumpets is said to bring down the walls of Jericho. In the East, the trumpet sound is a symbol of great spiritual power associated with insight and elevated consciousness. The sound of the trumpet is thought to be "heard" or perceived through the third eye--a point between the eyebrows--which can have direct communication with the Divine.
More recent texts and teachers echo this ancient idea. Mystic Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan has written, "Divine sound is the cause of all manifestation. The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe." In the early part of the twentieth century, H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, wrote in The Secret Doctrine, "Sound is a tremendous occult [hidden] power. It is such a stupendous force that the electricity generated by a million Niagaras could never counteract even the smallest potentiality when directed by proper knowledge."
This last statement leads to the idea that the great power of sound that created the universe is also accessible to humanity. Scattered through various religious traditions, we find references to the divine power of words. The Latin word cantare, root of the English "cantor," is commonly translated as "to sing." However, some linguists believe that the original meaning was "to produce by magic." The Mexican Huichol Indians use the Spanish word cantor, "singer," to mean "shaman"--a clear indication of the power they attribute to the voice. Another Latin word, carmen, is often translated as "poem," but originally it meant "magic formula."* (*In Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, by Joachim-Ernst Berendt.)
Mystics' and Scientists' Views
Some scientists, too, have recognized the power of sound and sound waves, which are sometimes organized and expressed as music. The sixteenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, "God was master of cosmic sound, causing the planets to leave their entirely circular orbits and to adopt consciously complicated elliptical orbits in order to produce ever more beautiful music." Kepler viewed the orbits of the planets as vibrations, the Music of the Spheres.
Some two thousand years earlier, the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras noted, "The seven heavens sounded each one vowel down to earth and became the creation of all things that be on earth." This statement could almost have come directly from a text of the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, in which the power of vowels is said to be divine. And the ancient rishis (sages) of India arrived at the same conclusion, teaching that the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the vibration of the five inner planets:
O Venus
A Jupiter
E Saturn
I Mars
U Mercury
Ravi Shankar, the contemporary master of the classical music of India, refers to the sound of God's power as Nada Brahma, the divine sound that reverberates through the universe and the "subtle human body" we all carry with us. Shankar states, "Our tradition teaches us that sound is God. Music is a spiritual discipline that raises one's inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss. We are taught to work toward a fundamental goal of the knowledge of the unchanging and eternal essence of the universe. Our music reveals the essence of the universe it reflects. Through music, one can reach God." Elsewhere he writes, "Saint musicians such as Baiju Bavare, Swami Haridas or Mian Tan Sen performed miracles by performing certain Ragas [classical Indian compositions]. It is said that some could light fires or oil lamps by singing one raga, or bring rain, or melt stones, cause flowers to bloom, and attract ferocious wild animals to a peaceful quiet circle around their singing."
In Joachim-Ernst Berendt's Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, astronomers Jeff Lightman and Robert M. Sickels describe fascinating sounds in their experiments with radio astronomy: "The edge of the galaxy becomes a noisy hissing cacophony of sound produced by quick shifts in molecular and atomic energy levels.... The giant planet Jupiter produces its own peculiar noise: huge rapid sighs like the intense roaring of a distant surge, triggered by Jovian electricity from storms of such intensity as to be worthy of the god whose name the planet bears. The sun makes noises too, hisses and crackling in quietude and roars of alarming intensity when it spews out giant portions of matter into space."
Rudolf Kippenhahn, director of the Max Planck Research Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, also wrote about the sound of the planets and objects of the heavens: "We hear the heterodyne ticking of pulsars ... high energy pulses from spherical star clusters, with sequences which repeat themselves. In space, there is ticking, drumming, humming and crackling."
The great rhythms of the cosmos are also revealed through modern physics. In The Silent Pulse, George Leonard writes about the vastness of space that composes what we call matter: "We can see the fully crystalline structure of muscle fiber, waving like wheat in the wind, pulsing many trillions of times a second.... As we move closer to the nucleus, it begins to dissolve. It too is nothing more than an oscillating field [that] upon our approach dissolves into pure rhythm.... Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the heart of the world, there is no solidarity, there is only dance."
The power of sound, the power of music, the power of vowels, and the power of speech are the great creative forces of the universe: as custodians of these, human beings possess tremendous spiritual power. For centuries, mystical scriptures and teachers of the East have taught mantra as a means for harnessing this power.
The Mantra Toolbox
Mantra is a Sanskrit word with many shades of meaning: "tool of the mind," "divine speech," and "language of the human spiritual physiology" are just a few of these. In the context of this book, mantra is a tool for healing problems that we all face in life. As the mystic Sufi master Vilayat Inayat Khan states, "The practice of mantra actually kneads the flesh of the body with sound. The delicate cells of the elaborate bundles of nerves are subjected to a constant hammering, a seizure of the flesh by the vibrations of divine sound."
Mantra can help you feel more peaceful or more energized. It can help you cope with illness and it can sometimes help effect physical healing. It can help you deal with difficult or unpleasant circumstances, by helping you to see a course of action, or it can give you the patience and perspective to just "wait it out." It can help you bring your wishes to fruition and create reality from your dreams. Mantra is a dynamic, individual, nonviolent way to approach conditions you wish to change. They are ancient formulas of divine sounds recorded by the ancient sages of India and held in trust and in secret for ages in both India and Tibet.
But mantra is not a panacea. It is not usually the only way or even the best way to solve human problems. Your life and your karma--the accumulated effect of all your thoughts and actions over many lives--are far too complex to be completely mastered by several weeks of work with spiritual formulas, no matter how powerful they might be. But mantra can completely solve many of the problems we face, and it can considerably soften others.
Life and Desires
Mantra can help you deal with the material concerns and necessities of life. All of us want or need something, or wish to make changes in our lives. Some of us want a mate. Others desire a new job or career. Many of us have faced health problems or know someone who has. People struggle with financial woes and the many life transitions. We have desires that can be as simple as a new car or as complicated as smoothing out some tangled family mess.
Many of us also want help in managing our emotions and inner lives. We encounter situations that produce knee-jerk reactions that we would like to prevent. We become frustrated, sad, angry, jealous. Sometimes our responses can be more problematic than the situations that caused them. A few words spoken in anger can do harm on a grand scale to a friendship or love relationship. Depression can become so severe that it drives everyone and everything from us. Longings and obsessions isolate us. Mantra practice can help you gain clarity about your life, your purpose, and yourself.
Sometimes we would just like to be able to help others, but we may not know exactly how to help. A family member or coworker may be in some difficulty, or we would like to be able to make a contribution to the good of our neighborhood or the world--if only we knew what to do. Mantra can help you find the right course of action for effective change.
The relatively simple tool of mantra can help you with all the conditions and challenges you need to face. Even though mantra is ancient in origin, you can apply it to virtually any contemporary issue with good results.
The Mantra Stockpiles
Modern scholars and Vedic priests differ about the age of mantra writings. Some scholars date the earliest written records of the four Vedic scriptures to 1000 b.c.e., although the oldest written version of the Rig Veda in existence dates from only the fourteenth century c.e. Yet in The Principal Upanishads, the respected scholar S. Radhakrishnan, quoting from Bloomfield's The Religion of the Vedas, states, "The Vedas are not only the most ancient literary monument of India, but also the most ancient literature of the Indo-European peoples, earlier than that of Greece or Israel."* (*Although Bloomfield's Religion of the Vedas (published in 1908) is referred to three times over the course of this massive 950-page book, his first name and other publishing information are not provided.) The earliest hymns and mantras contained in the Rig Veda are traditionally considered to date back to 1500 b.c.e. and possibly even to before 4000 b.c.e.
Hindu priests emphatically assert that mantra writings are much older than academic authorities believe. The popularly accepted history of mantra, which even today is conveyed through an oral tradition taught in Hindu temples, places the earliest writing at the time of the Mahabharata, some three thousand years before Christ. And Sanskrit mantras existed at least two thousand years before that in myth, story, and legend.
The Vedic teachings were originally reserved for the priest class, and its rituals, as well as the Vedas themselves and the mantras contained within them, were transmitted orally for thousands of years. After passing orally from generation to generation, Sanskrit mantras were first written on palm leaves so that they could be preserved. The first "librarians" were families who dedicated themselves to preserving these mantra writings. Cataloged by subject, application, and outcome, the mantras were meticulously stored and sheltered from the elements. When the palm leaves became brittle or moldy, the mantras were recopied onto fresh leaves while they were still legible.
As the stockpile of mantras became larger and larger, even whole families could not keep up with the recopying needed to maintain the library. For keeping abreast of the ever-accumulating new mantra information, summaries of some sections were created. These summaries condensed whole shelves of subject material down to a handful of leaves. This worked for several centuries until the stockpile again grew too large. Then the contents were summarized again. More hundreds and hundreds of years passed until the whole cycle was repeated once again. Throughout the several thousand years during which the summaries were being compiled, certain sections were considered so important that they were never summarized, but remained intact.
These Hindu teachings of inspiration and insight followed a similar path from oral transmission to transcription in Sanskrit. The Upanishads are the summaries of the summaries of the summaries of teachings created many thousands of years ago. The Upanishads contain the Forest Cantos, or Aranyakas, and the Brahmanas, which are fragments of larger, lost works. The four Vedas survived nearly untouched and unsummarized: Rig Veda, Artharva Veda, Yajur Veda, and Sama Veda. In a sense, the Vedas and the Upanishads are all collections of Sanskrit mantras linked together and intended to convey timeless ideas on a wide range of subjects.
The amount of information contained even in these fragmented summaries is staggering. A whole system of medicine is contained in the Artharva Veda--a system that Western medicine has only recently begun to acknowledge as valid. In the Rig Veda, spiritual matters of cosmology and individual development are set forth in grand mystical phrases and practices. Between 1000 b.c.e. and the end of the first Christian millennium, sages, scholars, and mystics such as Patañjali (200 b.c.e.), Shankaracharya (800 a.d.), and others presented even more specific practices for spiritual development and solutions to problems. It is from these teachings that Sanskrit acquired the title Deva Lingua, or "language of the gods," which connotes that even mortals can commune with the gods and become like them: powerful and immortal. The first requirement, however, is to learn to "speak the language" and thereby use the power it contains. Mantra is the language through which we invoke the gods and their energy.
Deva Lingua
While mantras, the Vedas, and the Upanishads are all written in Sanskrit, this language is no longer spoken in everyday conversation. Because Sanskrit is not spoken widely among the general population of any country, it is technically classified a "dead" language. Yet all Hindu religious practices and traditions are taught, conducted, and transmitted in Sanskrit. Most Buddhist practices that use the spoken word still contain the bulk of their material in Sanskrit. All of the swamis and teachers from India who have come to the West use systems of personal development derived from Sanskrit texts. So, to call Sanskrit a dead language does not take into account the daily practices of many millions of people.
Moreover, many Western languages can trace their roots to Sanskrit, which dictionaries often classify as Indo-European. Sanskrit truly deserves its other title, the Mother of Tongues, as scholars describe it. In Sanskrit, mata is "mother" and pitra is "father"; these are obviously close to the Latin mater and pater. The Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, and Romanian) derive from Latin, which is itself derived from Sanskrit, which was spoken for many centuries before Latin came into existence.
The Experiment
Over the years, I have learned many mantras for solving life's problems. To give you some idea of how this can work, I'd like to tell you how a mantra helped me through a particularly difficult time.
In 1980, many things changed for me. For eight years, I had been priest-in-residence at a spiritual center affiliated with a group in India, but based in Washington, D.C. I enjoyed being of service, and my responsibilities by and large were pleasant. However, the conduct of the organization's Indian leader was making me more and more uncomfortable, because he was behaving inappropriately regarding issues of sex, money, and power. I vacillated between staying and leaving, and the worry was enervating.
One day, in one of my usual two-hour meditation sessions, I saw a clock that read a quarter to twelve. I was shown that at twelve o'clock, the relationship I had long been seeking would arrive. I resolved to wait awhile before coming to a decision about leaving the center. As it turned out, those fifteen minutes took more than six months in real-world time. After six months, a woman named Margalo arrived at the organization. Within two weeks, I had left the center to move in with her. One year later we were married, and we decided to leave the organization altogether.
When I had first become involved with the organization, I was working as a television producer. Fairly soon after joining, I had become a full-time instructor in broadcasting at George Washington University. In 1980, however, my non-tenure-track contract was up and, newly married, I was considering my professional options. Margalo suggested we leave Washington, D.C., for her former home in southern California. I saw no reason to refuse. Once there, I knew I would have to develop a new career for myself. But despite all my efforts to find a job in Los Angeles, the media capital of the Western world, doors in broadcasting remained closed, and I was forced to take temporary jobs. I struggled to create some kind of balance between my discouraging search for a profession and my new, happy life with my wife.
During my years as a priest, I had used Sanskrit mantras almost exclusively in meditations to strengthen my focus and to foster spiritual insights. For any secular problem, I would return to prayers that I had learned from my Judeo-Christian upbringing in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Using mantras does not mean you have to leave your present religious organization or your roots or abandon other spiritual practices. While I still consider myself a Christian, I have explored many religious traditions, and over the years I have added other spiritual observances of Hindu and Buddhist origins to my daily practices to form a personal spirituality and practice of compassion and service. Mantra is a wonderfully effective complementary spiritual practice that can enrich your life.
In any case, the results I had obtained from prayers were sporadic, but I had accepted them. At this low point in my professional life, however, I decided to apply a mantra to my situation to see if it would help me. I chose a mantra that seemed appropriate for my difficulties in the material world, and I decided to work with it for forty days. I chose a forty-day practice because forty is a recurrent number in religious literature. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days. Noah tossed upon the seas for forty days. Moses wandered through the desert for forty years. The Buddha provided a variation by sitting under the Bodhi Tree for forty-three days until he achieved enlightenment. In Vedic Hinduism, forty days is the standard length for a concentrated mantra discipline. In Roman Catholicism, the novena, a daily discipline of prayer employed by the faithful to seek help in solving life's problems, is sometimes observed for five days, forty days, and fifty-four days, although it is traditionally done for n
ine days.
I figured that I needed a significant amount of time for my mantra practice to influence whatever forces were preventing me from finding a job. The intention I formed in my mind was to find a steady job in which I could make a contribution to others, and from which I could receive a living wage. Since many problem-solving mantras are general in nature, the mantra I selected was one for removal of obstacles:
Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha
(om gum guh-nuh-puh-tuh-yei nahm-ah-ha)
"Om and salutations to the remover of obstacles
for which Gum is the seed."
Among Vedic and Hindu sects, this mantra (which will be discussed in chapter 5) is universally acknowledged as supremely effective for clearing away obstacles of all sorts. Since I did not know what was preventing me from finding steady, gainful employment, my goal was to remove any obstacle, internal or external, spiritual or physical, standing between me and the right kind of job.
For the next forty days, I repeated the mantra as much as I could, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. While performing household chores, I would chant the mantra. While driving, I would chant it in my car. While eating or preparing food, I chanted it. When falling off into sleep I would keep the mantra going as long as I could. Upon waking, I would immediately begin chanting the mantra. If I was with other people, I would chant silently. If I was alone, I would chant softly out loud. I became an Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha chanting machine.
I liked the way the mantra made me feel. The rhythm of it quickly settled into my consciousness, and I found that after two weeks the mantra would start by itself if I was otherwise engaged. Waking up in the middle of the night, I could hear it faintly going on in some rear compartment of my mind. It agreed with my body and mind as if it were a nutritious, spiritual food.
After three weeks of working with the mantra, I was called upon to perform a Vedic ceremony for a group in Santa Ana. The ceremony lasted about an hour, and when it was over I circulated among the guests to chat and munch on snacks. With one small group, the conversation eventually got around to "And what do you do for a living?" I somewhat awkwardly explained that I was new to the West Coast and had not settled into any one thing yet.
After further conversation, one of the women in the group said that her company was looking for someone to help with a marketing project for the next three months. I inquired about the kind of work they did and she replied that it was a medical care facility that performed family practice, occupational medicine, and urgent care. I knew nothing about the health care field and said so.
Undeterred, the woman pressed me to call her and schedule an appointment for the next week. I assented, mostly out of courtesy and a sense that I should explore every possibility--but without any real hope of finding employment.
When I arrived for my appointment, I was met by my acquaintance's boss, Rick, who interviewed me for about ten minutes. I believed I was sunk because I showed no real understanding of their industry, but much to my surprise he finished his short interview with, "I think you will work out just fine. But I need to get the docs to sign off on it. Please wait here."
The doctors approved me and within minutes I had filled out some paperwork and become their clinic marketing representative performing fieldwork on a three-month temporary assignment. The pay was modest, but it beat temporary work or waiting by the phone, so I was grateful. All the while, I kept chanting the mantra silently inside.
After several days of making business calls, I learned enough to realize that the marketing materials I had to support my calls were just terrible. I couldn't banish this realization from my mind, and I began to feel more and more foolish as I made the calls. Finally, I had to do something.
At this point, I was on day thirty of my forty-day chanting discipline. That night, I reworked everything into three new pieces, using the colors of the building and the familiar caduceus medical symbol. When I arrived at the office the next morning, I sought out the doctor to whom I reported and briefly showed him what I had in mind. He stopped dead, looked at me, and said to meet him in the conference room in one hour. When I entered the conference room there was Rick, along with the woman who had suggested I apply for the job, the doctor who had interviewed me, and two other doctors who were partners at the facility. Unsettled, I realized that I was about to give a presentation. The doctor who had called the meeting said, "Show us what you've got."
After my ten-minute impromptu presentation, the docs asked me to leave the room for a few minutes. I nervously complied. When I was asked back in, my boss said, "Congratulations, you're our new marketing director. Get yourself some cards printed and also get this new stuff you designed printed as soon as possible." I was in shock, but still going on inside was Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha.
I finished out my forty-day mantra discipline without further incident. Within the next thirty days I was involved in a joint marketing project with a local hospital. The nurse who was the hospital's marketing director was friendly and technically very skilled. We worked well together. When we were nearly finished with the project, she asked if I would mind telling what they paid me. I did not mind, and told her. She wrinkled up her face and said, "They're getting you cheap."
After the joint project was finished, my boss congratulated us both on a job well done. After shaking his hand, the nurse motioned toward me and said, "You know this guy is wa-a-a-a-y underpaid. You better be careful or someone will make him an offer and he'll get away from you." I was flabbergasted, but my boss responded like a pro in every way. He grinned and said, "Don't you worry, we'll take good care of him." Within thirty days I had a 40 percent raise.
That was early in 1983. I stayed with this company for nearly seven years. I had numerous raises and felt I was appreciated for my work. I finally left when my supervisor decided to form his own company and made me an offer to join him.
I attributed my successful job search to my mantra discipline. Its effectiveness made a huge impression upon me, and I had a new appreciation for the power of spiritual formulas in solving everyday difficulties. I began to recommend mantras to others for their problems and they worked amazingly well.
I gave this same mantra to a friend of mine in Washington, D.C., who had just retired from a career in the Army. He had studied gemology and desired to find a job in that field. After searching for months in many cities, however, he was unable to find the work he wanted. I recommended that he begin chanting Om Gum Ganapatayei Namaha as much as he could for ten days. On the eleventh day, I performed an energy-cleansing ceremony on his behalf. Within three days he had several job offers and was well-started on his new career.
As another example of how mantras can be used to help us cope with problems in our daily lives, a friend of mine, Rae, was bothered by terrible neighbors across the street and next door. Those across the street would intentionally park in front of her house, blocking her driveway and making it impossible for her to get out, or for the trash haulers to pick up her garbage. Although she had called the police, they could only help her from time to time. The neighbors next to her were constantly noisy and resisted any request for consideration. Rae asked for my help and I gave her this mantra:
Narasimha Ta Va Da So Hum
(nah-rah-seem-ha tah vah dah soh hoom)
Narasimha invokes the energy for destroying the seemingly indestructible. Ta, Va, and Da invoke energies of the body and direct the energy the mantra creates to accomplish the highest good. So Hum is a mantra unto itself; it puts the mind in tune with the divine self within.
Rae began to chant this mantra many times every day. She quickly grew fond of the mantra, which felt good to her, and it helped her feel strong and positive in the face of her neighbors' disruptions. After about two months, her noisy neighbors sold their house and moved away. As of this writing, the neighbors across the street are gone a good deal of the time and the problem with them has lessened considerably. This mantra is also helping her build inner strength for her career in service to others.
Chanting a Sanskrit mantra alone did not land me my job with the medical clinic, but it helped me approach new possibilities and a new career with positive expectations. I believe that our mantras also helped my friends and me to maintain a calm and peaceful state of mind and body so that we were receptive to insights about how best to work through the challenges that presented themselves. Mantra practice also provided me with the energy and concentration to accomplish what I needed to do, and the inner confidence to make a worthwhile contribution in a field about which I had previously known nothing. It was the catalyst for a cascade of positive transformations and developments in my and my friends' lives.
In Healing Mantras, I catalog the success of my students and friends in their use of mantras. The book is intended to provide you with a toolbox of mantras to correct and heal various conditions in your life. These spiritual formulas can also help you create abundance, unlock creative power within you, and aid in manifesting a fuller life in every way. It is my prayer that you will succeed beyond all your expectations.
Textul de pe ultima copertă
Mantras, or simple chants, are short phrases packed with energy and intention -- specifically designed to generate powerful sound waves that promote healing, insight, creativity, and spiritual growth. Healing Mantras is the practical, how-to guide that makes the strengths and benefits of mantras available to everyone. The transformative power of sound has been passed down to the present from the sages of India, the classical scientists of ancient Greece, and the medieval monks of Europe. Even though the science and discipline of chanting and formal prayer are practiced in every religion around the world, this is the first time that ancient Sanskrit mantras have been explained and adapted to Western needs.
One of the few Western experts in Hindu and Buddhist mantras, Thomas Ashley-Farrand has practiced mantra-based spiritual disciplines for twenty-five years. In this illuminating book, he explains how and why mantras work and shows how to use them for everything from controlling habits to overcoming fear, from curing specific ailments to finding inner peace, from gaining wisdom to increasing mental clarity. In each of the more than fifty mantras, all translated from the original Sanskrit, Ashley-Farrand unlocks the power of every word, explains its appropriate application, and tells you how to pronounce it in easy-to-follow phonetic symbols.
These mantras can be repeated aloud or in silence and can be used by people of any religion or spiritual practice "as you wash dishes, as you drive on the freeway, as you meditate, or as you cook". Sound can help and sound can heal, and Healing Mantras now makes this sound medicine available to everyone.
Descriere
An accessible and practical guide to the ancient practice of healing chants.