Swami Kriyananda and Music
If you want to know me, listen to my music
—Swami Kriyananda
About Music
"It is said of the Chinese emperors in ancient times that whenever they toured the provinces, they asked to listen to the music. They didn't look at the financial records. Nor did they inquire into the honesty of the officials. If the music was right, everything, so they believed, was as it should be. But if something was not right with the music, not only did this deficiency mean there was something wrong in those other areas of activity, but it was the music above all that needed correcting. Once that had been set right, everything else would improve also."
—from Art as a Hidden Message
by J. Donald Walters (Swami Kriyananda)
The music of our times
Yogananda used to say that "chanting is half the battle." When he came to America, he created an entirely new form of chanting, taking the best India had to offer and adapting it to Western sensibilities and needs. Kriyananda has given similar emphasis to the importance of music, and extended his Guru's work into the realm of popular music. There's surely a great need for it! Music in our time has become increasingly dissonant, nervous, violent, and out of touch with the source that used to nourish it and give it meaning. If this trend continues—and it shows no signs of reversing itself—the costs to our society will be enormous, even explosive.
Singer and composer
Before coming to Yogananda, Kriyananda had been urged repeatedly to make singing his career. After his ouster from SRF, he found himself increasingly in demand as a singer (in part because of two albums and one 78-speed recording of Yogananda's chants he'd recorded for SRF). Finding no popular songs that he was inspired to sing, it occurred to him to reach out to a general audience by writing something himself. Since then Kriyananda has composed over four hundred musical works, including numerous songs and choral pieces, a string quartet, and a full-length oratorio. The Ananda World Brotherhood Choir sings his music, and has been well received internationally. They have been awarded several prizes, and have also sung for the Pope.
Importance of melody
The melodic line in a piece of music, Kriyananda has said, is what speaks most deeply to us. It represents our inner aspirations. Most of today's music is sadly lacking in melody. ("New Age" music is a case in point; it compounds this failing by limiting itself almost exclusively to instrumental music. As India has long understood, the human voice is the instrument par excellence for expressing human feelings and emotions.) Kriyananda's music is characterized especially by its beautiful melodies. Often he simply wakes up with them in the morning. At other times, when he prays with clarity for a specific melody, it's given to him at once. He's said he doesn't write down a single note unless it's given to him. And so, he says, the music is really not his at all.
Role of harmony
Kriyananda has written harmonies to some of his music, but has focused more on the melodies. His emphasis on melody expresses, in the sphere of music, the consciousness of Self-realization that Yogananda brought to the West. In a fascinating paragraph in his book, Art As a Hidden Message, Kriyananda states:
"Chords express a dependence on group thinking and interaction. This emphasis will diminish, I believe, as individuals increasingly assume responsibility for their own lives. As faith in higher values returns and is perceived as a personal, not an institutional, issue, greater importance will be given to melody."
Music is AUM
Visitors to Ananda over the years have often said that it's the music there (Kriyananda's) that has uplifted them the most, and, in many cases, changed their lives. Among all the arts, Kriyananda has said, music is the most powerful in its effects, because it is vibration itself, and so a manifestation of the AUM vibration of which we're all made.
"I like your philosophy," someone once said to Kriyananda after a lecture, "but I'd like to know more about you, personally." "To know me," Kriyananda replied, "listen to my music." Would you like to make a new friend? We've provided a representative sampling for you here of some of Kriyananda's compositions. Happy listening!
Kriyananda on Chanting
“Chanting is half the battle,” said Paramhansa Yogananda.
Words are thoughts crystallized. Melodies are the resonance of the heart's aspirations. Harmonies deepen the emotional power of those aspirations. And rhythms ground those aspirations in the present. Combining thought, melody, and rhythm in a spiritual discipline can provide a powerful force for awakening. This force must be used rightly, for just as it can be used to uplift, so can it also harm or debase.
During the time of Nazi Germany, highly effective, although negative, use was made of slogans, melodies, rhythms, and harmonies that entered the subconscious, influencing normally pleasant but suggestible people and sweeping them along on a tidal wave of mass hysteria and hate.
Chants can be powerful in a number of ways. The great master Sri Ramakrishna met a man who had a reputation for being a fierce disputant. In debate, the man was unbeatable. Ramakrishna was shown in meditation that this man's success was due to a certain mantra, a powerful word-formula that he repeated before every verbal encounter. Upon meeting him, and before the man could utter his mantra, Sri Ramakrishna repeated it loudly The man was thereby stripped of his power, and lost his aggressiveness and conceit.
Another example of the power of mantra comes from the life of Paramhansa Yogananda, when he stilled a violent wind. The wind was a manifestation, he declared later, of the karma of World War II: in other words, of the energy that had been stirred up by the violence of that war. He recalled a mantra he'd learned as a child in India, and asked a disciple to repeat it while striking three times with her shoe on the porch where they were standing. Instantly, the wind subsided. An article appeared the next day in the Los Angeles Times commenting on the strong wind that had begun blowing the day before, and then, suddenly, subsided.
In a Yucatan jungle in Mexico, over forty years ago, I asked my guide if he had ever witnessed a rain dance.
“It is interesting you should ask that,” he replied. “As it happens, I was in this area once, years ago, when the land was experiencing a severe drought. I came upon a village where, in the zocalo (town square), I saw a rain dance being performed. I stood for a time, watching the dancers. All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, dark clouds gathered. Moments later we were drenched in a great downpour.”
I knew of a man in India who had a mantra to cure cobra bites. He worked in a telegraph office. Telegrams arrived there frequently from remote parts of the country requesting cures. The effectiveness of his cure was legendary.
The power of mantras and chanting doesn't come automatically. Will power and concentration are needed, and inner attunement with the words.
The spiritual purpose of chanting is not to develop powers, but to give one control over the mind, that he may direct it one pointedly toward God. If chants and mantras can bestow power over objective nature, how much greater their effectiveness when their aim is to benefit the chanter himself. The highest purpose of chanting is to help awaken us to our own spiritual potential: to bring us closer to Self-realization.
Spiritual chanting is heartfelt prayer, deepened by the dimension
of music and by the building power of repetition. Repetition is not for the purpose of getting the Lord's attention: It is to deepen the intensity of one's own prayer. To repeat a chant mechanically, in a singsong manner, has virtually no spiritual value.
Spiritual chanting is different from singing songs or hymns. I've written well over a hundred songs myself-for instruction, inspiration, and reflection' Such music serves a different purpose, however. Though it may inspire, it doesn't lift the mind into a meditative state.
How to Chant
The art of chanting correctly is, first, to practice it with full awareness of its inner purpose. That purpose is not to awaken sentiments or to stir up the emotions. It is to focus the heart's feelings and raise them toward superconsciousness.
The Maharani of Cooch Behar told me she'd once asked her family priest why he intoned his chants so loudly. “Well, you see, your Highness,” he explained, “God is far away' If I don't shout, how will He hear me?” God isn't far away, of course. It is we who distance ourselves from Him by the “noise” in our own minds, a noise people often carry with them into their prayers and meditations.
Loud chanting does have its place. It is good at the start of meditation-not for the reason that priest gave, but to command attention from our own minds. Loud chanting creates a magnetic flow. Like a mighty river, it can dissolve the eddies of thought and feeling that meander idly along the banks of the mind. Like a magnetic military leader, it commands attention from your thought-soldiers and fires them with zeal.
Once you've got their attention, chant more softly, more inwardly. Direct your energy upward, from the heart to the Spiritual Eye.
Once your conscious mind is wholly engaged in chanting, bring it down into the subconscious by whispering. While chanting in the subconscious, offer it, too, up to superconsciousness at the point between the eyebrows, until you feel your entire being vibrating with the words, the melody, and the rhythm.
At last, chant only mentally, at the point between the eyebrows. Let your absorption lift you into superconsciousness. Once it does so, and once you receive a divine response, you will have spiritualized the chant. From then on. any time you sing the chant it will quickly carry you again to superconsciousness as if on a magic carpet.
To spiritualize a chant, keep it rotating in the mind-for days at a time, if necessary: not only in meditation, but as you go about your daily activities. This practice is also called japa. Christian mystics, too, speak of the continuous “prayer of the heart,” and of “practicing the presence of God.” All this is japa.
The higher aspect of chanting involves listening to the mighty sound of AUM, and becoming absorbed in it. You'll hear this sound first in the right ear. Gradually let it permeate the brain and the entire body, until every cell vibrates with that sound. Try to hear AUM in everything you do, in everything you perceive. This is true japa, when the mind no longer repeats words, merely, but is intoxicated with the bliss of the “music of the spheres.”
The Cosmic Sound is described variously in the world's scriptures. The Jews and Christians call it the Amen. Muslims call it the Amin. To the Zoroastrians it is Ahunavar. To Hindus and Buddhists it is AUM. In the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the Cosmic Vibration is called the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The word AUM is an attempt to capture in human speech the sound of the Cosmic Vibration. By attuning one's consciousness to that sound (by Christians called also the Holy Ghost and the Comforter), one enters the stream of vibration that proceeded out of the Spirit, and that merges back into the Spirit at creation's end and at the end of the individual soul's cycle of outward wandering. By merging in AUM, liberation is attained.
Once the mind is focused by chanting, and the inner energy is
awakened, take your chanting inward. Don't only “make a glad noise unto the Lord,” as the Bible puts it: Listen for His answer. Meditation is listening, as I've said. Feel yourself chanting in attunement, above all, with the Cosmic Sound. Harmonize yourself inwardly with that sound.
Harmony is an aspect of music not usually included in traditional chanting. In the West, where harmony is so intrinsic to musical expression, one may wonder if the lack of harmony in Eastern music is not due simply to a lack of musical sophistication. I recall the first time I heard spiritual chanting. I'd been raised on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical western composers. I'd also studied singing in the Western classical tradition. Compared to that music, the stark simplicity of chanting seemed to me almost naive.
It was only when I got deeply into it that I understood its spiritual power. And it is only since composing music myself, complete with harmonies, that I appreciate more fully the fact that, although harmony lends richness and emotional depth to music, its very complexity prevents it from bringing melody into deeper harmony with AUM.
Even though I try, in my own music, to write chords that will help the mind to flow in an upward direction, I am well aware that the true” music of the spheres” lies far beyond outer harmonies. It creates another kind of harmony in the soul.
What Words to Use?
There is not a strong tradition of chanting in the West. Most of the chanting I've heard has been Gregorian chant, which is little heard outside of monasteries, or chants transported from India. Buddhist chanting, like Gregorian chant, is a recitation of scripture and is not, therefore, an appeal of the heart to God. The Indian form of chanting usually involves repeating various names of God. Since these names are foreign to most Westerners, and don‘t possess the deep emotional associations they have for most Indians, they are less deeply meaningful, in themselves, than they are for people who grew up in India, or else are not always meaningful in the same way.
I suspect that for most Westerners the words have more a mantric influence than a sentimental appeal. The sounds uplift, but the words are less easily associated in the western mind than in the Indian with mental images of Rama with his bow, Sita in her selfless service to Rama, Krishna with his flute, Ganesha with his elephant‘s head, and so on. The extreme antiquity of Hindu culture has guaranteed an abundance of symbols, most of which have lost their inner meanings even for Hindus. The lack of such visual associations with the names may, in one way, be an advantage for Westerners, since it forces them to focus more on the sounds of the names, as they allow those vibrations, which are powerful, to uplift them.
Other aspects of the Indian chants—the melodies and the rhythms-are often soul-stirring, and need no further explanation. India has developed a tradition of chanting as an expression of deep, intimate love for God. There is power in such chanting, even if you don‘t really relate to the words you’re singing.
Paramhansa Yogananda, as a great yogi whose mission was to disseminate the yoga teachings in the West, introduced a new kind of chanting here. It is based on the repetition of meaningful phrases, rather than of the divine names. Some of the chants he wrote he translated from Bengali or Hindi songs. Others, he wrote himself. This kind of chanting is more like a repetitive prayer set to music, and is better suited for meditators, who understand the importance of combining the soul's appeal for divine grace with self-effort. For by singing God's names only, what remains in the mind is the thought “God will do it all for me.” What Yogananda's method of chanting accomplishes is to awaken in the mind the thought “In these ways I will cooperate with His grace.”
One of his chants goes:
“I am the bubble, make me the sea.
So do Thou, my Lord! Thou and I, never apart,
Wave of the sea dissolve in the sea,
I am the bubble, make me the sea.”
Very simple, you see? And very easily memorized. When such a chant is sung repeatedly, the mind is easily lifted up into meditation.
Some of Paramhansa Yogananda's chants go further in the direction of personal affirmation, and are less similar to the traditional concept of prayer. An example of such a chant
begins with these words:
“Why, O mind, wanderest thou?
Go in thine inner home!”
“These chants, too, are powerful, spiritualized as they were by a great master. They are in many ways better suited for people who follow the path of meditation. I myself have sung them for as long as I've been meditating—nearly fifty years. The inspiration I derive from them is precious to me beyond words.“
—Supersonsciousness – A Guide to Meditation by Swami Kriyananda
