If the mind is talking but only one aspect of the mind is chanting, that chanting is as good as useless. A more effective way of chanting is gentle and conscious recollection of your mantra. Picture a tap that’s dripping, one drop after the other. Imagine that you are recalling in your mind the mantra between drips, that each section of the mantra is falling from the crown of your head one drop at a time: Om bhur-bhuvah svah, drip, tatsavitur-varenayama, drip, bhargo devasya dhimahi, drip, dhiyo yo nah pracodayata, drip. When you are recalling the mantra this way, your mind will concentrate better and your other thoughts will not intrude. It’s a very subtle technique that I have figured out after years of practice and it has made a tremendous difference to the outcome I have gained from mantras.
For years I practiced mantra chanting without any significant results but the day I figured out how chanting was done properly, the impact of it changed. I began to notice some of the blessings that the scriptures promised.
It was not complete though, and to devote myself fully to my path of tapas , I left everything behind and went to the caves and woods. There I devoted my time to invoking a mantra in the sense that the Devi, the deity of the mantra, would come in front of me and talk to me. That’s one of the ultimate achievements a mantrin – somebody who practices a mantra is called a mantrin – can attain.
The fourth japa , the ultimate one, is called ajapa . If you add ‘a’ in front of japa , it means the opposite of japa . Therefore, ajapa means you are not actually chanting – the mantra is chanting itself. With practice, you will get a grip over this. Some people will understand it in a matter of hours, for some it may be days, while for others it could be weeks. But if you stay on course, you’ll understand what I am trying to say here.
While in the woods, I used to sit for very long hours – one straight stretch of ten hours, and then get up and do another stretch of six hours, and so on. It was very tiring: I would just sit like this and mentally chant (read recall) my mantra. At the end of every session, I would mark myself. And if during the ten hours I turned my head because there were rats and other creatures there distracting me, I would immediately deduct five marks out of ten, because my goal was to sit still like a rock, unmoving.
Sometimes, when I would cry out for Devi in devotion, it would actually interrupt my meditation, because tears would roll down my cheeks. It was icy cold, and when the tears emerged they were warm, but by the time they rolled down my cheeks, they were cold and my body consciousness rose.
When you sit still for long hours with extraordinary stillness and supreme concentration, you lose awareness of your body for a sustained period of time. You are sitting, you are mentally aware, but the body is not there anymore. This is not something I experienced on a daily basis, but this would happen often during long periods of meditation. For this, I would do a breathing technique and sometimes lose consciousness. In the beginning, when I would lose consciousness, I used to fall. There was a little wooden plank on the wall. The wall was also made of wooden planks, and my head would hit against the plank when I fell, and then I would come back to consciousness.
Sometimes my immersion in my japa was so intense, that while doing that breathing technique, I would hit my head against the wall and then return to consciousness after a minute or two. I knew the exact time, because I had a digital clock, so I would always know how I was doing against time if I were to keep my eyes open.
The most beautiful thing was that returning to consciousness was not like the flick of a switch. It was more like the coming of the dawn, so it would happen over a minute or so, and the first thing that would happen was, I would hear distant sounds such as people talking – sometimes, people talking about me. At that time, few people knew me – perhaps only a few hundred. Of those, 10 or 15 people may have been talking. There was not a day when my mother and my siblings did not think about me.
Sometimes, at the time I returned to consciousness, I would hear those distant conversations. Then, as I would regain my consciousness, I would only hear the mantra. Was the mantra going on when I was unconscious? I don’t know. But this happened unfailingly when I did that breathing technique. Through this, I understood what ajapa actually entails: The moment you are in your consciousness, your mantra is chanting constantly within a part of you. So ajapa is not something you can do – ajapa is something that happens to you.
This is much like meditation. In the beginning, you do meditation, but as you progress, meditation happens to you. Ajapa is the ultimate state for a mantrin in terms of elevating your practice and taking it to the ultimate level. But you have to become one with the mantra, such that you may become the mantra itself; nothing but a vibration of the mantra. Every pore of your existence starts to reverberate with the sound of your mantra.
When you do japa in these four stages, it gives birth to four kinds of sounds. The first type of sound is vaikhari . Vaikhari is something that is produced artificially, by a person. When I am speaking, my tongue is touching my teeth or my palette and is producing some sound – that is vaikhari . Nature cannot produce this sound. Somebody, some element or entity in the play of nature creates the sound.
The second is madhyama . Madhyama is a sound that comes about by human intervention, but not created entirely by a person. Examples of madhyama could be the sound of someone slapping a tree or his thigh. With this clapping sound, I have not spoken anything.
The third is pashyanti , where absolutely no human intervention gives rise to the sound. The rustling of leaves is a good example of this. Pashyanti means the one that can be seen, or that which witnesses. You can see the fluttering of leaves and you can also hear the rustling sound they make.
The fourth sound is para , which means the one that is beyond, or absolute. When you do ajapa or when you do the japa and this kind of chanting happens to you – and even in the third kind, mansika japa – you start to move towards para , one of the finer states of consciousness.
I will give you a little analogy, which demonstrates what I mean by consciousness. Picture a very still lake – there is not a sound, there is not a breath of wind, it is very quiet. On the bed of the lake, a tiny bubble forms. It’s barely visible when it is at the bottom, but as it rises through the water, it becomes progressively bigger, and when it emerges, it’s a huge bubble and makes ripples across the lake’s surface.
Something similar happens with your consciousness when it is not under your control. Like tiny bubbles, thoughts or emotions come from the depths of your mind. As they rise within you, you feel increasingly out of control and they bubble to the surface, causing you disturbance. But if your consciousness is truly calm, no thoughts or emotions will form in the first place.
Physical chanting creates its own, small disturbances. When you do vachika japa , the first kind of japa where you do vaikhari sound, it’s like tiny bubbles popping at the surface, because you are producing that sound. With the second kind, madhyama , the bubbles only form, but don’t rise. While performing mansika japa , the bubbles actually travel to the surface. With the fourth, the para – while performing ajapa – no bubbles form in the water.