What is Mantra?

(waves on beach) Namaste, friends. Welcome to the journey into the fascinating world of sounds. We are going to do this journey through an exploration of mantras. Mantras, as many of you would be aware, are powerful sounds that have the capacity to bring change within our system. But the question is, how can a sound bring a change in our being?

The answer is something that all of us have experienced. We use sounds in our daily life, through language, and also through music. And we know very well that certain kinds of music make us feel happy, while there are other kinds of music that can even depress us. And then you listen to another music, and it elevates our heart immediately. So sounds have a direct impact on our emotions and sometimes they even evoke certain imaginations in our mind, so if somebody uses a certain word in a certain way, we get different pictures in our heads.

So we all know that sound can change our lives in different ways depending on how we feel and depending on what the sound is. Sounds are therefore intimately connected to our lives and who we are. Science also tells us that essentially, we are all vibratory beings because we are made of molecules that are all the time vibrating. If they're vibrating, they are making some form of sound or the other. So every individual can be regarded as a composite of different kinds of vibrations.

We have vibrations at our physical level, we have different sets of vibration at an emotional level, we have a different set of vibrations at a mental level, and who knows, maybe there's a different set of vibrations beyond all of that. And therefore the kind of vibrations that we have as a composite being, You can imagine that physical vibrations, emotional, mental, something more. So we are a combination of these different interactions, interfaces of vibrations. And the nature of vibrations almost determines the kind of space that we inhabit. And this space in turn influences the space outside us.

Now I want to draw your attention to a very interesting connection between sounds, spaces, and our breath. Sounds, as we saw, can influence spaces. So if we have sound vibrations that are like that, they generate a certain kind of space. If we have a sound vibration that are like that, they generate an entirely different kind of space. Now you can imagine that if we have a sound vibration which is like that, how much space is there for the air to flow within it?

Not much I would say. But if you have a sound vibration which is like that, you see there's a lot of space for the air to flow freely. As a result, our structure, our sound structure is directly related to the kind of space that we have generated within ourselves. And that space in turn influences the kind of breathing that we have. And so we can say that, our sounds, in some way, directly or indirectly have an impact on our breath.

And we all know the importance of breath in our lives. The quality of our breathing determines also the quality of our health. And therefore, becoming aware of the different sounds we produce and we hear, has a direct impact on our lives, and changing the sounds that we hear and we make can thereby influence the way we breathe, and as a result, how we feel. There was a very interesting experiment done by a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto. He wanted to see the effect of sound on water, and he found that when he played a certain music on sound, and then crystallized that water, the crystals formed differently when different kinds of music were played on it.

So when he played, let's say classical music, the crystals that formed were very symmetrical and beautiful. And in another occasion, he played music which was like hard, heavy metal. I'm afraid that was an experiment, and he found that the water crystals were very disturbed. And then he got an idea, he said that, let me say certain words, and he said words like, "I love you," "I'm grateful," "Thank you." And again froze the water and found that the crystals were beautiful. And when he said things like, "I hate you," "I kill you," the water crystals that formed were very disturbed.

Then he wanted to push the experiment further, he said, let me just think of those sounds on that water, and so he thought thoughts like, "I love you," "I'm grateful," and he noticed that the crystals again had the same patterns as if he was wording them. The same was observed when he said something nasty. The water crystals were highly disturbed. And so friends, what we can recognize from this experiment is that sounds are not just the verbal sounds that we make but also go into the realm of our subtle thought sounds, and all of this have an influence on our body, on the molecules of our body. So we are going to look at certain mantras.

A mantra, I would also like to define as systematized sound technology. Now what does that mean? It means that sounds are consciously or spontaneously placed in a certain order which will necessarily create a certain result in the world. Now what would that mean again? So if I make a particular sound, I can break glass, if I change the sound, I no longer break glass.

There is an intimate relationship in the universe between a sound and the effect it produces. That effect can be on the physical plane, it can be on the emotional plane as we've already seen, on the mental plane, and on any other plane beyond that as well. But mantras, therefore, are conscious sounds that are designed to create very specific results within us and without us. In fact, what is amazing is that they have the capacity of changing the very vibratory structure of our being. The more powerful the sound, the more concretely the whole system, the vibratory system of the being can be reformatted.

So in this journey into the world of sounds, we are going to explore simple vowels, the mechanism of producing that sound, also looking at what is the vibratory nature of the sound. And I'll share with you some things from the work of David Frawley's book, Mantra Yoga and Primal Sounds, which I think is a brilliant book on the subject. And from that, we will explore how we can do certain practices. In my exploration, I have found that using gestures can enhance the effect of certain sounds. So in our journey together, I'm going to be using certain gestures, and invite you to join along.

But feel free to explore them the way it sits comfortably with you. Play with them, observe what comes up, engage with these sounds, and you will see how you can enrich your lives and nourish yourselves through the power of mantras.