For many thousands of years, yoga was practised by the people of this continent but later, for some time, they forgot all about it. We are now reviving that science. I am coming from India, which is not very different to your country, and the people of India are also not very different from you. The whole world is now immersed in materialism and it has forgotten its spiritual inheritance. It is only India, which even today preserves the great spiritual science, maintains the gurus and the teachers, and it is from that country I come with the message of yoga for all of you.
The subject which I have in mind is the yoga of mantra. It is known by various names like mantra yoga, japa yoga. It is very significant that I am talking about mantra yoga today. It is because this is the easiest of the practices of yoga which every person can practise without facing any difficulty and without facing any risk. Whether you practise the mantra with faith or you practise it without faith makes no difference. Just as you sow seeds in the earth and it doesn’t matter which way the seeds fall, they will germinate. In the same way, if you practise the mantra with concentration or without concentration, with faith or without faith, with sincerity or without sincerity it is going to produce its result.
All of you know by your own experience how difficult it is to control the mind. It is true sometimes you are able to concentrate, you have strong willpower, you are able to control the mind at one point but to be able to control the mind for years and years together is not possible for everybody. Why? Because our mind is restless. It is running after the objects of the world. It has to worry about things, it is filled with anxiety, it has a lot of passions, and so it is impossible for an average person to control the mind. But then it is also necessary for us to be able to improve the mind without controlling it.
When you try to control the mind either you get a headache, or you get funny feelings, or you have frightening experiences which you are not always able to handle. Therefore, we have to find an easier way through which we can improve not only the mind but also manifest the inner spiritual being. There are two bases upon which we can improve the mind and manifest our spiritual being. One is the form or symbol; another one is sound or mantra. I will tell you later about the symbol, maybe tomorrow.
Everybody has his own mantra; everybody has his own sound. If you can discover that sound, that mantra, and you go on chanting it then the sound that it produces is registered by your mind and by your self. For example, this sound can be experienced in four different stages. The first is the gross stage of the sound. You chant, Om Om Om. This is the produced sound and is the first category of sound. The subtler category of sound is merely whispered and the third category is mental. You don’t even move your tongue – nothing is to be done, you are just thinking, Om Om Om, that is called mental sound. Beyond these three sounds, there is the fourth sound which you can hear without producing Om. You can hear it without it being produced when your mouth, lips and eyes are closed. In the mind you hear it as if somebody is producing the mantra from inside. That is the fourth category of the sound which is known as the transcendental sound.
Suppose you have received a mantra from your guru. That works like a seed sown in the earth. The guru tells you repeat the mantra. Your soul, your atman, your mind, your conscious- ness registers that mantra. For some time that mantra becomes dormant, yet through incessant practice of japa yoga that mantra later germinates. It grows. When it grows you do not have to practise it; you have to listen to it because your self, your atman, your consciousness is repeating the mantra and you are the listener of the mantra, not the practitioner of the mantra.
23 May 1982, Santo Domingo