Soundless Sound

From the Yoga Sutra 9 we might have few questions.

IN DOING SADHANA ON AUM, IS IT BETTER TO REPEAT IT LIKE A MANTRA OR TO TRY TO HEAR IT AS AN INNER SOUND?

The mantra Aum has to be done in three stages. First, you should repeat it very loudly. That means it should come from the body – first from the body because body is the main door. And let first the body be saturated with it.

So repeat it loudly. Move to a temple or in your room or somewhere where you can repeat it as loudly as you like. Use the whole body to repeat it, as if thousands of people are listening to you without a microphone, and you have to be very loud so that the whole body trembles, shakes with it. And for a few months, almost three months, you should not bother about anything else. The first stage is very important because it gives the foundation. Loudly, as if your every cell of the body is crying it, chanting it…

After three months, when you feel your body is completely saturated, deep down it has entered into the body cells. And when you say it loudly, it is not only the mouth: from head to toe, the whole body is repeating it. It comes If for three months you repeat it continuously at least one hour per day, within three months you will feel that it is not the mouth, it is the whole body. It happens – it has happened many times.

If you do it really honestly, authentically, and are not deceiving yourself, it is not lukewarm but a hundred-degree phenomenon, then even others can listen. They can put their ears to your feet, and when you say loudly they will listen to it from your bones coming because the whole body can absorb sound and the whole body can create sound. There is no problem about it. Your mouth is just a part of the body – a specialized part, that’s all. If you try, your whole body can repeat it.

It happened: one Hindu sannyasin, Swami Ram, did it for many years, loudly chanting “Ram”. Once he was staying in a Himalayan village with a friend. The friend was a very well-known Sikh writer, Sardar Purnasingh. In the middle of the night Pumasingh suddenly heard a chanting of “Ram, Ram, Ram”. There was nobody else – only Ram, Swami Ram, and himself. They both were sleeping on their cots, and the village was far away – almost two, three miles away. There was nobody.

So Purnasingh got up, went around the cottage; there was nobody. And the more he went further from Ram, the sound was lesser and lesser. When he came back, the sound was again more. Then he came nearer Ram who was fast asleep. The moment he came nearer, the sound became even more loud. Then he put his ear to Ram’s body. The whole body was vibrating with the sound of “Ram”.

It happens. Your whole body can become saturated. This is the first step – three months, six months – but you must feel saturated. And the saturation is felt just like when you are hungry you take food – you feel when the stomach is satisfied. The body must be satisfied first and if you continue, it may happen in three months or six months. Three months is the average limit; to few people it happens even before; to few it takes a little time more.

If it saturates the whole body, sex will disappear completely. The whole body is so soothed, it becomes so calm with the sound vibrating, that there is no need to throw the energy out, there is no need to release, and you will feel very, very powerful. But don’t use this power – because you can use it, and all use will be misuse – because this is just a first step.

Energy has to be gathered so that you can take the second step. If you use it… You can use – because the power will be so much you can do many things – you can simply say something and it will come true. At this stage it has been prohibited that you should not be active, and you should not say anything. You should not; say somebody in anger that “Go and die,” because this can happen. Your sound becomes so powerful when it is saturated with your whole body energy, so it is said at this stage no negative thing should be said – even unknowingly. No negative thing should be said.

Never think a negative thought when you are meditating. It is possible because you gain some power.

When you don’t meditate, there is not much problem. You can say whatsoever you like because you are impotent. But when you meditate, you should be watchful of every single word that you say because your every single word can create something around.

First step is to saturate the whole body, so the whole body becomes a chanting force. When you feel satisfied, then take the second step. And never use this power because this power has to be accumulated and to be used for the second step.

The second step is to close your mouth and repeat and chant the word Aum mentally – first bodily, second mentally. Now the body should not be used at all. The throat, the tongue, the lips, everything, closed, the whole body locked and chanting only in the mind – but as loudly as possible: the same loudness as you were using with the body. Now let the mind saturate with it. Three months again, let the mind saturate with it.

The same time will be taken by the mind as it has been taken by the body. If you can attain the saturation within one month with the body, you will attain, with one month in the mind also. If you attain, in seven months with the body, seven months will be taken by the mind, because body and mind are not exactly two. They are rather body-mind – psychosomatic phenomenon. One part is body, another part is mind: body is visible mind, mind is invisible body.

So let the other part, the subtle part of your personality, be saturated; repeat inside loudly. When the mind is filled, even more power is released within you. With the first, sex will disappear; with the second, love will disappear – the love that you know, not the love that a Buddha knows, but your love will disappear.

Because sex is the bodily part of love and love is the mental part of sex. When love disappears, then there is even more danger. You can be very, very fatal to others. If you say something, it will immediately happen. That’s why, for the second state, total silence is proposed. When you are in the second stage, be completely silent.

And there will be a tendency to use the power, because you will be very curious about it, childish. And you will have so much energy that you would like to see what can happen. But don’t use it and don’t be juvenile, because the third step has to be still taken and energy is needed. That’s why sex disappeared – because energy has to be accumulated: love disappeared – because subtle energy has to be accumulated.

And the third step is when the mind feels saturated. And you will come to know it when this happens; there is no need to ask how one will feel it. It is just like eating: you feel, “Now, enough” The mind will feel when it is enough. Then you start the third step. The third is: neither body has to be used nor mind has to be used. As you lock the body, now you lock the mind.

And it is easy. When you have been doing the chanting for three, four months, it is very easy: you simply lock the body, you simply lock the mind. Just listen, and you will hear a sound coming to you from your own heart of hearts. The Aum will be there as if somebody else is chanting; you are just the listener. This is the third step, and this third step will change your total being. All the barriers will drop and all the obstacles will disappear. So it can take almost nine months, average, if you put your total energy in it.

IN DOING SADHANA ON AUM IS IT BETTER TO REPEAT IT LIKE A MANTRA OR TO TRY TO HEAR IT AS AN INNER SOUND?

Right now you cannot hear it as an inner sound. The inner sound is there, but it is so silent, so subtle, and you don’t have that ear to listen to it. The ear has to be developed. The body is saturated, the mind saturated, only then you will have that ear – the third ear, so to say – that you can listen to the sound which is always there.

It is a cosmic sound; it is in and out. Put your ear to the tree and it is there, put your ear to the rock and it is there. But first your body-mind should be transcended, and you should gain more and more energy. The subtle will require tremendous energy to be heard.

With the first sex disappears, with the second step love disappears and with the third step everything that you have known disappears, as if you are no more – dead, gone, dissolved. It is a death phenomenon, and if you don’t escape and become scared, because there will be every tendency in you to escape, because this looks like an abyss, and you are falling into it and the abyss is bottomless… There seems to be no end to it. You become like a feather falling into a bottomless abyss – falling and falling and falling – and there seems to be no end to it.

You will get scared. You would like to run away from it. If you run away from it, the whole effort has been a wastage. And the running will be that you will start chanting the mantra Aum: that will be the first thing to do if you start running, because if you chant you are back into the mind. If you chant loudly you are back into the body.

So when one starts listening one should not chant because that chanting will be an escape. A mantra has to be chanted and then dropped. A mantra is complete only when you can drop it. If you go on chanting it, you will cling to it like a shelter, and whenever you will be afraid, you will come again and chant it.

That’s why I say chant it so deeply that the body is saturated; there is no need to chant in the body again. The mind is saturated, there is no need to chant it; overflowing, there is no space to put more chanting into it. So you cannot escape. Only then the hearing of the soundless sound becomes possible.