Love is in the SOUND
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
Hello, I am happy and honoured to be here with all of you and I was asked today to speak on the topic of Love is in the Sound. Love is a universal emotion. At the same time, it has many distinct expressions.
For example, in some traditions, people may hug each other. In some traditions, people may pat each other on the back. Some people may prop their noses against each other.
There are various ways in which love can be expressed. When we, in the Bhakti Yoga tradition, consider the connection of love between the finite consciousness and the infinite consciousness. The love between finite and infinite consciousness is expressed primarily through sound.
I will start by clarifying a couple of terms in this context. The main topic will be based on the topic of Love is in the Sound. Sound is both a literal as well as an acronymic meaning.
S-O-U-M-D We find aspects of sound, potency to manifest love, that I will discuss. In spiritual circles, we hear two words, prayer and meditation. These words can have very different connotations.
In this context, prayer means we speak to God and God hears. And meditation means God speaks to us and we hear. Prayer is the upward transition of sound from the finite consciousness to the infinite consciousness.
Whereas meditation is the downward connection from the infinite consciousness to the finite consciousness. The word meditation is used in various senses. And often deep contemplation on any subject is also called as meditation.
That is an application of the word meditation. But in a spiritual sense, when we go to the deepest level of our self and connect to the innermost core of our being, therein we connect with the infinite consciousness. And that is meditation.
So love is in the sound. This means that there are certain sounds that both express the love of the infinite consciousness to the finite consciousness. And that can also express the finite consciousness' love for the infinite.
And these specific sound vibrations have been researched and explained in the ancient Bhakti-Bhakti tradition. And they are embodied as mantras. Mantra is a sound vibration that has special potency.
I'll talk about this when I come to the point of potency. So now satisfying. S-O-U-N-D.
These are the five aspects of mantra sound which I'll be talking about. So S, first is satisfying. In this word, even if someone speaks sweetly, sweet sounds, whether they be in a speech or music, they give pleasure.
They give great satisfaction. So now, when we talk about the sound of mantra, there is a qualitatively higher level of satisfaction. This is not just the satisfaction that comes from hearing sweet music.
It is, yes, mantra can be sung in sweet musical tones as is being sung so beautifully just now. So that is there. The musical aspect is there.
But the music is just the covering. It has a form and there is a substance. So the music can be the form.
And the form itself can be attracted. But beyond that, the substance is the sweet sound. And that is the sound of mantra.
So this is something which needs to be experienced. And it can actually be fairly easily experienced that the satisfaction that one gets when one recites these mantras, especially the mantra that we sang just now, Hare Krishna mantra, there is a profound non-material enrichment that comes. And that, at one level, to our perception, is an expression of the infinite's love for the infinite.
Going back to the starting point of how love can be expressed in different ways, in different contexts. Suppose there is a small child who is asleep. And now, while sleeping, that child is not even aware whether the mother is there, whether the mother is next to me or she is far away, whether she cares for me or she is lost in her own world.
But suppose it becomes freezing cold and the child is shivering. And then maybe somebody turns away. The teacher or some more traditional setting, somebody lights a fire or puts a blanket around the child.
Now, the child's eyes are not open, the child is not able to sense that the mother is there right now. But, even without opening the eyes, even without seeing the mother, just the warmth of the blanket, just the warmth of the hug, conveys at a subliminal level that there is someone who cares. And the warmth that I am experiencing is an expression of the care that is being offered by that person.
The child may not comprehend it consciously, but at a subconscious level there is a comfort and a sense of security that comes because of experiencing the warmth. Similarly, at our present level of awareness, our spiritual faculty is dormant. Our spiritual consciousness is like a sea.
And at this level we can't perceive the infinite presence or infinite love. But when we recite mantras, when we sing mantras that connect us with the infinite, then the satisfaction, the relief, the deep stressing that happens because of the recitation of those mantras, this is at our level of cognition, at our level of understanding, an expression of the infinite love for us. So the satisfaction that we experience can work at different levels.
Suppose a wall is being constructed and there is a construction engineer who is a civil engineer and the civil engineer wants to evaluate how thick is the wall, how well is the concrete being built. Now a child may come and throw a ball at the wall and the ball is going to rebound from there. And the child is trying to catch the ball.
On the other hand, if an engineer comes there and the engineer throws a ball at the wall, now when the engineer sees how much the ball rebounds, based on that the engineer can evaluate how hard the wall is, how soft the wall is and how well the concrete is made. So the point I am making is, externally the child throwing the ball at the wall and an engineer throwing the ball at the wall, both seem to be the same. But because the engineer has deeper understanding of the situation, so the engineer can learn more about the situation for the child just a bit.
Similarly, when we recite the mantras, at that time almost everybody who comes and tries to open one's consciousness to the recitation of mantras, that person can experience a satisfaction, an enrichment. Now, let a child throw a ball and go away. So let's say some people may just experience a nice break.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is a more educated, a more spiritually scientific way of looking at things. What is the reason for this experience in the first place? And that question can help us, with the help of the Bhakti Yoga tradition, to understand the satisfaction, the peace that we experience through chanting the mantras.
That is actually the expression of the infinite love words. So S was satisfying. Now O is omnipotent.
Amin is a prefix that is usually used to refer to all. Omnipotence means all potencies there. In the philosophy of language, there is a standard question, where is the meaning of words located? Normally, if you want to understand the meaning of a word, we might go to a dictionary.
And, okay, this word is unfamiliar. Let me look at the word dictionary. So that is one way of understanding it.
So if we consider the meaning of words is located in dictionaries, then that would mean that the sound of the word is simply just a conveyor of the meaning. So, like, say, the sound that we speak, that is like a pipeline. If I am speaking something, the pipeline of the sound goes from my mouth to your ears.
And the words that I speak, they are simply conveyed through that sound. That is one understanding of it. At the same time, if you study language a little bit, you know that words have connotations and words have notations.
So a lot depends on the context. And the same word can mean not just different, but opposite things, depending on the context. So, for example, traditionally, the word wicked meant cruel.
But now, nowadays, the word wicked, that was a wicked game. Enjoyable, pleasant. So the same word can have opposite meanings.
The word epithet was traditionally used to mean a positive attribute. Glorification, praise. But in certain contexts, it can mean insight.
So the meaning of the words is not just there in their formulaic formation of the letters. It is also written in the context. So similarly, mantra.
The potency of the mantra is not just in the sound formulation. Yes, there are sounds that vibrate. So, for example, in Hare Krishna Mahamantra, there are the sounds Hare, Rama, Krishna.
There is a sound that vibrates. But the potency is not just in the sound. The potency is actually in the words used in the refer to of the sound.
There are certain surveys done. For example, there was a survey done at Florida University, where a certain group of students were asked to, or subjects, they were divided into three groups. One was a group who was told, let me just say a study group, control group.
They were not asked anything. Another was told to chant this Hare Krishna Mantra. And a third was told to chant any sound vibration of their preference.
Whatever they liked. And this study was a part of a doctoral thesis. And the result that they found was that people who chanted the Hare Krishna Mantra, they were able to curb whatever negative habits or negative behavioral traits that they had.
They were able to curb them much better. And they were able to bring out their positive side much more. One of the characteristics of love is that it brings out the best in us.
If we love someone, then for the sake of the person whom we love, we want to become better human beings. We want to become better persons. Love brings out the best in us.
And after that is the primary differentiator between love and lust. Lust means we are just using the other person for our own pleasure. And in that case, because our pleasure is the center of our actions, then often that lust brings out the lower side in us.
But because we are not really concerned about the other person as a person. The other person is just reduced to an object for our pleasure. So the point I am making is, love brings out the best in us.
And correlating this with the point that about how deep it is observed in certain ways that chanting of mantras helps bring out the better side in you and helps curb that lower side. So that, from the educated perspective of the bhakti-bhakti, indicates that the love of the incarnate is expressed through the sound. And because of being expressed through the sound, that's what brings out the better side in us.
And so, all of us have such, as I said, we have a lower side and a higher side. As part of us which we want to develop. And a part of us which we want to push aside.
You know, this will drag us down. And the power of the mantra is such that it will empower us to overpower ourselves. In acoustics, there is something called resonance.
When two sounds, the frequencies match, then suddenly the sound becomes louder. So like that, the sound of the mantra helps our consciousness to resonate with the infinite consciousness. And because of that resonance, a higher level of personal well-being and personal development happens to the child.
This is a manifestation of the omnipotence of the demons. In fact, many people, this has been an observation, not just in one part of the world, in various parts of the world, that many people who were addicted to various bad habits, often elaborate de-addiction programs, did not help them as much as the diligent program of mantra meditation. Why is that? Because the power of the mantra has the capacity to break the hold that habits have on us.
Generally, we can be introduced to a world that celebrates freedom. Everybody wants to be free. And individually, socially, you know, like slavery.
Anybody who is held as a slave wants that person to be free from slavery. Certainly, physical slavery is a piece that has to be abolished whenever it is still present. But there is another kind of slavery that is the mental slavery.
Mental slavery means, going back to the example of addiction, you say a person is addicted to something. Then it is as if between the mind of that person and the object of addiction, there is a rope. And that rope pulls and pulls and pulls.
In the Bhagavad Gita, in the 16th chapter, the 11th verse is referred to as Asha Pash, the noose of desire. And the noose of desire pulls and pulls and pulls. Now, how does this work? Now, we see that, a simple example, that fish is caught by a bait.
Or a mouse is caught by cheese. But both the fish and the mouse have excuses. And the bait looks like food.
And they don't know in advance that this is a trap. The mouse doesn't know that this cheese is in the mousetrap is going to trap me. The fish doesn't know that there is a hook behind this bait.
So, they have excuses, the bait looks like a substance, and they don't know in advance that this is a trap. We humans rarely have either of these excuses. Many of the objects that we get addicted to, we know well in advance that these are harmful.
And along with that, most of the objects that we get addicted to, they are none of them a substance. None of them are necessary for that. And we become addicted.
Why is that? Because, going back to the first point, satisfaction. We are all pleasure-seeking beings. And when anything promises us pleasure, we become attracted to it.
And once we become attracted to it, once we experience even a little pleasure, our brains are wired in such a way that we undergo selective amnesia. Selective amnesia means, if a particular object gives pleasure, we often tend to remember the pleasurable aspect and we forget the unpleasant consequences. So, if somebody drinks excessively and gets a hangover, the next time the temptation to drink comes, the high rate of the drink is what one remembers.
The hangover, one just doesn't remember it. So, anything that gives us pleasure, we become attracted to that. I was talking about omnipotence.
So, the holy name, the mantras, the recitation of the mantras, that helps us experience real satisfaction. And that's how it has the power to help us break free from any lower intangibles that we may have, any lower undesirable habits that we may have. U is universal.
Universal refers to the point that the sweetness, the satisfaction, the power of the sound, one does not require any specific cultural background to experience the universe. It's like, you are reciting this mantra here, you are reciting a mantra there, there is sweetness all over the world. Would it be the same thing? So, I would like to share one story.
It happened in Australia, not Australia, Russia. So, in Russia, in the banks of the Volga River, every year there is an annual folk song festival where, Russia is also a huge country, there are very different sub-cultures there. So, those different sub-cultures are invited, come and recite, come and recite your songs.
So, they all, they came there, and then the devotees, the bhakti yogis went there, and they recited, they said, we will come with a folk song from the ancient Bhakti Yogas in India, that is the Hare Krishna. So, he started reciting that. Now, whereas all the other songs were just performance-based.
The artist would perform it, you go in there. The Hare Krishna kirtan was participation-based. It's not just that the performer sings, but you can recite responsibly.
And so, the plan of the bhakti yogi organizers was that they would have people from around 7 to 7.30, and 7.30 to around 8.30, 8.30 to 9.00 they would have people, and they would end the program. But when they started by around 6.30, a huge crowd started coming, and above the stage where the devotees were sitting, above that, they were in a platter, and right on the head foot, the letter of the Mahabharata, so that people could recite it. And they started reciting, starting 7.30, and as people started getting so fascinated, so captivated by the sweetness and satisfaction, that the singers stopped singing, but the audience kept singing.
So, all the devotees were singing, they were so happy, they said, let's continue. It got to 8.30, the singer became hoarse throat, and all the devotees came and started singing. It became 9.00, it became 10.00, 11.00, 12.00, 1.00. At 1.30, the amplifier gave out smoke.
And that time, they decided to stop. So, the next morning, early morning, a young couple came there to meet the devotees who had performed there till the last. They said, this young couple, they did not know English, the devotees were speaking, so they had a Russian-English translator.
He was saying that, you know, we had come to this festival on our honeymoon, and yesterday night, when we were singing, we saw, this was the best night we had ever experienced. We have a question. So, what is the question? The question is, in such happiness, in singing this song, you want to know, what is the meaning of this? So, they just had no idea what the song was all about.
They have such satisfaction. Why? Because, the mantra speaks in the language of the heart. The language in which the human heart communicates with the divine heart.
And the divine heart communicates with the human heart. And that's why it can cross all cultural barriers. It's universal.
And that universality is also an indication of the divinity of the sound. The spirituality of the sound. Love is expressed through sound.
Love through sound means that the infinite love for all finite beings is universal. That infinite consciousness which in the Bhakti Yoga tradition is known as Krishna. Krishna's love for all is trans-sectarian.
It's universal. The Bhagavad Gita Krishna says that, … In the 14th chapter, 4th verse, in the Bhagavad Gita, he states that, He is the source of all unions. That universality of the potency of the sweetness of the mantra is also an indication for the thoughtful mind that this is an expression of the infinite love manifesting in the soul.
Now, N S-O-U-N N is non-material. Non-material means that this sound is not like ordinary sound. Although, we may sing this song and then afterwards we may go somewhere else and we may sing some other song.
I'm using the same throat, using the same tongue, I'm using the same ear to hear it. So, what is the difference? The difference is because through this sound, the divine manifests. I'll give a couple of examples to illustrate this point.
Firstly, if you consider a carries note. Suppose, a mother has told a child that there should not be any litter in the house. So, anywhere if you see any trash paper lying on the ground, just tear it and throw it in the dustbin.
Now, that morning when the father is rushing to the office, say a $500 currency note has fallen on the father's home, and the child sees this note and gleefully goes there and picks it up and the mother screams, hey, don't tear it! So, slowly, slowly, to tear whatever paper it is. This is not paper, this is currency. What do you mean currency? It's paper.
See, this paper, this paper, is the same thing. Now, say the child has his birthday next. Mother says, on your birthday, with this $500, you can get a thousand chocolates.
Really? With this paper, you won't get anything. With this paper, you'll get a thousand chocolates. So, now the child will not believe, the child will not understand.
Actually, the child goes to the shop and gets a thousand chocolates. There he'll understand. Although both seem to be paper, there's a huge difference.
The difference is that this paper, the currency note, has been authorized by the government and therefore it has a special value. Similarly, yes, there are various different sounds that we can recite. There are many songs also that will give us some pleasure, great pleasure.
Some songs are classics. However, the sound, the mantra is of a different category. So, it is not material in the sense that it is not just the sound that is recited with our tongue or without it.
Yes, those are implements that are used. But the principle is that when we recite the sound of the mantra with our open heart, with our heart open to higher experiences, calling out in search of higher realities, then the infinite consciousness manifests through the sound. And that's how we experience higher realities.
So, it is non-material. And that's why we see that over a period of time other mantras, other sounds that we chant, one may get tired. But this sound, if we chant attentively, invoking the presence of the divine, then one will experience such enrichment that more words will not be able to describe.
Great bhakti yogis in the past have tried to give us some inkling of the magnitude of pleasure that they experience through such sound. So, one such renowned bhakti yogi is Rupa Goswami, 16th century saint. And he gives a metaphor.
The metaphors have always limitations. Because in general, in the English language, or in any language, there are comparisons are made to give us knowledge of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. By comparing an unfamiliar object with a familiar object, we get an understanding of the unfamiliar.
In fact, that is how all knowledge progresses. If today I come and if I say at the start of my talk, today I will be speaking about the demographic trends of polar bears in Siberia. You say, what has this got to do with me? There might be some knowledge, but when it is not connected with what we want to know or what we know, it makes no sense to us.
So, knowledge progresses by connecting the new with the old, the unfamiliar with the familiar. Metaphors are used to convey that which is beyond words, that which is ineffable in words. Rupa Goswami used the metaphor.
He says, लोजाने जनिता कि अप्रते क्रिष्णे कि वर्ण द्वाई He says, when I chant the name Krishna, I cannot put in words how much nectar is there in these two syllables, Krishna. To give an example, he says, I wish that in order to chant the name Krishna, I wish that I had thousands of mouths and to hear the name Krishna, I wish I had millions of ears. This is quite a graphic metaphor.
Sometimes there is a delicious feast where we eat one delicacy, second delicacy, third delicacy, fourth delicacy. And we feel, my stomach is full now. I can't eat more.
Sometimes, you know, in the Egyptian tradition, there were some pharaohs and other nobles who were epicureans. They were just gluttons for pleasure. And they would want to eat and enjoy the pleasure of eating so desperately that they had their physicians make special painless vomiting pills.
So they would have their royal bowels in which they would get food and they would eat food to their full stomach's capacity. And then, still the desire to eat would be there. So what they would do? They would get a vomiting pill, vomit everything out.
And then, again get bowels full of food and eat the day. Now, can you imagine how desperate they were to enjoy the food? Of course, the problem here is not just the capacity of the stomach. The limitation is not just because of the capacity of the stomach.
Because even if we ingest again and again by emptying the stomach, still the body has to process all the food. The alimentary canal, the saliva, has to churn all that food. And most of those people who try this sort of thing, they got a variety of diseases in their diet.
So after that, nobody strives to try vomiting pills. But the point is, this can be an example that somebody's such a desire to eat, that person feels, if I had more than one stomach, then I would have been able to eat so much. So like that, this metaphor that, I want thousands of mouths and I want millions of ears to relish the sweetness of the holy meal.
That metaphor is given by a Kamesh Bhakti Yogi that gives us a inkling of the kind of enrichment, the kind of fulfilment that awaits the intricate Bhakti Yogi on the path ahead. This is again an example of how this particular sound is not material. And the last B is direct.
Direct means that the sound of the holy meal brings the finite consciousness, the sound of the mantra, I use the word mantra and holy meal interchangeably, but the mantra is made of certain names and those names, because they invoke the divine, they are considered holy. So the mantra, the sound of the mantra offers us direct access to God. How does it direct access to God? Once there was a poor person who had never seen gold.
And he desired to see gold. The king of the country was quite benevolent. So he went to the king's palace and he requested that king's court and requested, I would like to see gold.
Can it be allowed me to see gold? He said, yes. He said, I have got a treasury filled with gold. So you go up the stairs, go left, there will be a door over there.
Tap on the door, the door will be open and you go inside. In the treasury, a person would open the treasury for you and then show you gold. This poor person readily agreed.
And he went up the stairs. He went through the door, went through the security entrance, went to the chest. When the door was opened, dazzling, glittering, gold ornaments were there, gold biscuits were there, gold objects were there.
He was very satisfied. Oh, I finally got to see gold. And then, when he was coming down, he noticed that the door was also bull-footed.
The staircase was also bull-footed. The treasury, the plates, the glasses, they were also bull-footed. And the staircase on which he went, the staircase was also bull-footed.
But because he had no experience of what gold was, so when he went up, he couldn't understand that this is gold. Once he went up, he saw that it was gold. And then when coming back, he saw that it's like that.
The mantra is not just a tool to experience the infinite. The mantra is the manifestation of the infinite. The staircase for the poor person was a means to go up to the treasury where the gold was there.
But after seeing the gold in the treasury, this poor person went up to the staircase also where the gold was. So like that, initially, we were thinking that the mantra is a tool for raising our consciousness. It's a tool for linking with the infinite.
That is a minor understanding. But that's not the complete understanding. The complete understanding is that the mantra is not just a tool.
The mantra also manifests the gold. And that's why this gives an opportunity to directly experience the infinite consciousness. As the infinite screams out to our level of perception.
It gives us an opportunity to experience the unlimited fulfillment that comes from love. So I'll summarize, and then you can have a few questions. I spoke on love is in the sound.
I started by talking about how love has different expressions in different cultural contexts. Then I talked about the love between the finite consciousness and the infinite consciousness, and how that can be comprehended, how that can be experienced and managed. So I said that the sound is O-U-N-D.
So S-O-S, is anyone remembering? Sorry? Satisfaction. So I experienced how, I explained how. When I was chanting the mantras, there was a great satisfaction I experienced.
And that satisfaction has just made me feel the warmth of a blanket, or feel the warmth of the heater. So I understand on a subconscious level, these are the expressions of my mother's love. Similarly, to the deserving practitioner, the satisfaction is an experience that informs his love for the finite.
And in that context, we discussed how the same activity done by the uninformed and informed person will have different aspects to it. A child putting a ball at a wall, an engineering putting a ball at a wall, a different understanding that can come. So remember, the same mantra chanting, there are different levels of insights, there are different kinds of epiphanies that different people can get from chanting the same mantras.
O, is anyone remembering what is O? Omnipotence. Omnipotence. So we discussed about how the sound of the mantras can help us have the potency to help us break free from unhandleable behavioral traits.
So it's about how our bad habits, or whatever lower habits that we have, they are like mental bonds between us and the object that is the bond that I have, that is the to which a person will get attached. So by offering higher satisfaction, the power of the mantra is that it can cut off these bonds and thus it can boost our higher self. Love brings out the best within us.
Love wants us to become better than what we are. Similarly, the love of the infinite within the experience through the sound of the holy name, sound of the mantras, helps us bring out the best from within us. Then you, do you remember? Universe.
So we discussed in that, the story from Russia on the 4th festival, how a couple who had no knowledge of what the mantra means, still experienced great satisfaction listening to the mantras. Not just that couple, but so many people were listening to the mantras, so jubilant that they continued the kirtan till the amplifier blew off. So let us use universe in that sense.
Why is the satisfaction of mantra chanting so experienceable beyond cultural boundaries? Because it is universe. Because it manifests infinite love for the infinite. Because it links our consciousness with the divine consciousness.
And, do you remember the word then? Non-material. So non-material. I discussed about how there is a currency note and automatic note.
The uninformed chanting is similar, but the wise person is a huge difference. Similarly, between ordinary sound and the sound of mantra, there is a huge difference because the divine manifests through the sound. And in that, we will play an example of how Rupa Goswami, a bhakti-yogi, a par-existence bhakti-yogi, gives this an indication of how fulfilling mantra chanting is by saying that I have thousands of mouths and millions of ears.
This was the example of Egyptian hymns. And lastly, B is direct. So, the mantra is not just a tool to the infinite, the mantra is also the manifestation of the infinite.
An example of a gold staircase and the golden treasure. So, this way, the mantra that we chant, it is an opportunity for us to experience infinite love streaming down to us, to our level of consciousness, to tap the rhythm of the sound of the name. Thank you very much.
Are there any questions?