“So any kind of music, Western, Indian, or anything else, can give you results if you are sincere about it and make it into a sadhana,” I said.
“You can. I am sure that if Tukaram Maharaj, who lived here in Maharashtra almost four hundred years ago, were to come here to Bombay today and we were to play some nice Western song for him he would sit quietly and listen and enjoy it—or at least he would look as if he were enjoying it. All the time on the inside he would be hearing his mantra ‘Rama Krishna Hari, Jai Jai Rama Krishna Hari; Rama Krishna Hari, Jai Jai Rama Krishna Hari -set to the rhythm and melody of the music.
“In my own case, whenever I ride a train pulled by a steam engine my own mantra starts to repeat itself in rhythm with the engine. The same was the case when I worked with textile machinery: the noise of the spindles would give me a rhythm. People who are serious about their mantras and put them into their hearts and souls will say them all the time. In fact, I per sonally find Western music better than Indian music for doing japa, because Western rhythms are simpler than Indian ones, which require more atten tion to avoid getting lost.” Aha! No wonder he enjoyed the rock music I brought for him.
“Of course, there is more to using rhythm in sadhana than merely repeat ing your mantra to the rhythm of the driving wheels of steam locomotives or to the sound of the electric guitars of Barbados. I think you have heard me play the Ganesh Paran before.”
“Yes, I have.” It is a little-known rhythm designed to invoke Ganesha.
“Once, in a small Indian principality named Datia there was a pakhawaj (large two-headed drum) player named Khudav Singh. He was an expert at pakhawaj because he worshipped the Goddess Durga. In fact, before he would begin to play he would throw the pakhawaj into the air and Ma would strike it three times. Then he would catch it and start to play.
“The sister of the Maharaja, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, loved Khudav Singh’s music and used to listen to him play whenever she could. Eventually she fell in love with Khudav Singh himself. This enraged the Maharaja, who told her to give him up. When she refused, the Maharaja demanded that Khudav Singh reject the girl. But Khudav Singh said, ‘She loves and appreciates my art. Why should I tell her to go away?’ The Maha raja then said, “All right, since you have disobeyed me you will be crushed under the foot of an elephant.’ Kings dispense justice like that.
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“The king invited all the people of the kingdom to the execution as a warning to them not to act foolishly like Khudav Singh had. The elephant was fed wine until its eyes became red, absolutely. The Maharaja asked Khudav Singh if he had any last request. He replied, ‘My pakhawaj, which has been my life to me, should be crushed along with me.’ He was given his pakhawaj. As the elephant advanced, Khudav Singh began to play the Ganesha Paran. When it is played properly Ganesha must come before you; He has no choice, He can’t escape. This was a way for Khudav Singh to call his chosen deity: ‘Mother Durga, please call Ganesha, help me!’
“Durga, who is after all Parvati in another form and as such is Ganesha’s mother, requested Her son to aid Her devotee. Ganesha agreed, and entered the body of the elephant. The elephant then sat down in front of Khudav Singh and began to caress him with its trunk. For half an hour the soldiers prodded, poked, and goaded the elephant, but it refused to attack.
“Then the Maharaja realized his mistake and said, ‘Let my sister be given to Khudav Singh, and let the elephant wander freely in my kingdom. Wher ever it goes, those lands are to be given to Khudav Singh.’ And until a short while ago Khudav Singh’s family possessed those lands.”
“Will the Ganesha Paran work for anyone?”
“It will if you know how to play it properly, and if you visualize Ganesha in the right way while you play it. It is a musical sadhana, created especially for the purpose of invoking Ganesha.
“All the various sadhanas which use music are part of Nada Yoga. In Nada Yoga you worship the Nada Brahman, the music of the spheres, the Absolute expressed as the sound Om, which emanates from Lord Shiva. If you follow this sadhana to its conclusion you will finally see that you and the universe are not different-One-in-All, All-in-One. This is what I mean when I say, ‘Everywhere I see, everything is Me!’
“Anything that has sound has shakti, and all shakti has sound associated with it. The Absolute Itself is silent; It has no qualities whatsoever, which is why there is no Bija Mantra for Lord Shiva. Shiva has no melody to Him; He is pure rhythm, the father of music. This is why Shiva is always depicted carry ing a damaru (small two-headed drum), the first musical instrument ever cre ated. Since laya means both rhythm and dissolution, a Pralaya, the periodic dissolution of the universe, is merely the return of everything to the Pra-thama (first) Laya, the first rhythm: the Absolute. The sound ‘Om’ is the first sound to arise when creation begins, and it is the last sound to disappear at the time of the Pralaya. But even after the melody-the manifested universe-has totally disappeared, its rhythm lingers on, first as anusvara and then as bindu.
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AGHORA II: Kundalini
“You know that in Indian iconography Shiva wears a crescent moon on His forehead; do you have any idea of what that suggests?”
“None.” “In the Sanskrit alphabet the sign for anusvara is a crescent.” I slapped my forehead in disgust; I knew that!
He smiled. “Here the crescent moon is an external sign of Shiva’s internal consciousness, a sign that His consciousness is full of Nada, and that if you worship Him your mind can be filled with Nada too, which will enable you to follow that sound back to anusvara and bindu, to the source of sound.”
“Oh. Is the bull He rides on related to all this also?”
“Of course. One of the Sanskrit words for bull—-go- also means both ‘sound’ and ‘sense organ.’ This indicates that Lord Shiva ‘rides’ His senses—He permits them to function but controls their movements per fectly—and that He moves with the help of Nada.
“I have told you that bindu is the source of all sound, which in the human begins with intention and culminates in vocal speech. Laya involves withdrawal of all our projections into bindu, the source. Speech begins with Para, progresses through Pashyanti and Madhyama, and then reaches Vaikhari, verbal speech. This is the path of pravrtti, creation. If you want to use sound to follow the path of nivrtti, the path back to the source, you have to begin where you are, in Vaikhari, and progressively refine your conscious ness back through Madhyama and Pashyanti to Para, to bindu.”
“Nada Brahman is central to Kundalini Yoga. You may recall that when Kundalini passes through the Anahata Chakra you hear the sound known as the Anahata Nada. It may sound to you like Krishna’s flute or like Shiva’s drum, depending on what sort of sadhana you are doing; it is the same sound, interpreted differently by different minds. At first you hear this sound in your right ear, because the left ear is meant for spirits. Remember this: when you hear someone talking only in your left ear it is sure to be a spirit.
“Each individual hears a slightly different nada. There are 108 gatis (gaits, or modes) of nada; 108 = 1 + 8 = 9, the number of chakras in the body, according to Aghora. Which mode of nada you hear depends on your past karmas, present tendencies, ancestry, and other things as well. The gatis are many, but once Kundalini reaches the top of Her course you hear only one
sound: the Nada Brahman, the Great Sound.
“All rivers go to the ocean and not vice versa. If the ocean were to go into all the rivers, what would happen to the rivers? They would be finished, and
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so would be the surrounding land. In sadhana of Nada that ocean is the ocean of bhava, intense emotion. The rivers are the nadis, and the land is the human body. First you follow your rivers into the sea, and then if you are meant to return to embodied existence the sea will flood the rivers, which will overflow their banks and fill you with an overwhelming divine intoxica tion, which is Bhava Samadhi. If you keep at it you will progress to Maha Bhava Samadhi, which can lead to Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Did you know that the story of Krishna and the gopis is actually a step-by-step description of this type of sadhana?”
“No.”
“I’ll describe it to you sometime,” he said as we went into the kitchen for lunch.