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� Om Swami

THE HIDDEN POWER OF GAYATRI MANTRA

Why This Book

I once read a beautiful story that really touched my heart.* A master and his disciple were seeking alms and they stopped by a small house. Whether the tiny size of the house was more worthy of one�s notice or its dilapidated condition was anyone�s guess.

�Praise the Lord!� the master hollered and knocked on the door. �We�ve come for alms.� There was no response from anyone who might be inside that one-room house. �Bheeksham dehi ,� he said in a loud voice again and waited for another minute. No one came out. In line with their tradition, he made a third and final call. Soon, a little girl came running out.

�Sorry, master,� she said, �but we have nothing to give you.�

The monk looked at her lovingly and said, �Don�t say no, my daughter. Can you give me a handful of dust from the ground?�

�Dust?� she said, surprised.

�Yes, a handful will do.�

Obliging the master, the girl bent down, took a bit of mud from the ground and put it in the master�s bowl. He blessed her and walked away with his disciple. The disciple was both intrigued and upset. Intrigued because he thought his master�s action was absurd, and upset for their tradition permitted alms from one house only on any given day. Who eats dust? Will have to do with water today. My master�s lost his mind or what?

�Why, master?� he said, unable to control his curiosity. �What are we going to do with dust? We could have just visited the next house and gotten proper alms.�

�My son,� the master said, �by remaining hungry, today we have transformed one life.�

The disciple couldn�t make sense of this statement while the master continued speaking, �I introduced her to the joy and merit of charity. Aaj dhool di hai, kal phool bhi degi.� (Today she learned to give a handful of earth, one day, she�ll give a flower too.)

So it is with sadhana, the path of elevating your life and others� by continuously purifying yourself. Today if you undertake a basic spiritual practice, overcome a small hurdle, tomorrow you�ll be able to take on a more advanced one, handle bigger challenges. Since my last book on mantras, I have met over 1500 people in one-on-one meetings and more than 3000 in groups. A common issue, even complaint, is that what I wrote in that book is daunting, to say the least. Some of the steps were not clear, they said. That, it�s very hard to muster the courage to undertake intense sadhana. That, if I could recommend just one sadhana, which one would it be. And finally, if I could give them a simpler method, something that appears more within reach, it would motivate them.

It made me think and like the monk in our story, I thought if I could introduce you to a simpler (read easier) way of sadhana today, then who knows, tomorrow you may feel confident and motivated to take on something more intense. After all, when you go to learn music from a teacher, not every student spends his time learning ragas, some just want to be able to sing or play simple songs and find joy in that.

I�ve written this book with the view that at least I should introduce you to the power, rewards and joy of sadhana. For instance, once you know how to play/sing a few songs, you may feel inclined to go deeper. In doing so, I am still expounding on the thirty-six core steps of sadhana as well as giving you the much shorter method of using only seven key steps. You can undertake whichever you like more based on your temperament, schedule and goals. Both ways are almost equally rewarding, one being more immersive than the other.

Thank you for trusting me; it is the basis of my inspiration and writings. As always, in this book too, I share with you the truth as I know it. Even for a moment I don�t forget that my utmost duty is not to fascinate you with tall claims of something out there, something supernatural, but to share with you the miracle of what�s inside us naturally. This discovery is just as beautiful, empowering and liberating.

Let�s take a walk.

* I have paraphrased this story a bit but I first read it in Kadve Pravachan by Muni Tarun Sagar, the famous Jain monk.

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Why Gayatri Mantra

Where should I begin? Although I have chosen the path of meditation in my own life, much of what I know, if not all of it, is attributable to the grace of Divine Mother. In this day and age, when we are conditioned with Western thought, it is natural to question the efficacy or the relevance of mantras.

I can tell you from my firsthand experience that the power of mantras is one, immense; two, real; and three, accessible. When we listen to music, we can hear the harmony within it � and we know that certain chords, melodies, rhythms and scales can evoke certain emotions in us. This is regardless of whether we know how to sing, play an instrument or read music notation, etc.

As a listener, listening to music can make you cry, it can make you laugh and so on. Similarly � and it�s not just a metaphor: it is very real � whether or not you know it, the sound of mantras can bring alive long-forgotten memories in you. Tendencies, feelings, emotions, knowledge, wisdom, powers and siddhis¹ you have been carrying within yourself over lifetimes can be evoked and invoked with the power of a mantra.

The abiding dilemma in Sanatana Dharma is, what is that one supreme energy one should tap into? People ask me this all the time that there are so many gods or forms of God, to whom should we pray? Most fascinatingly, even in a religion as diverse as Sanatana Dharma, with as many sects as stars in the sky (okay, maybe not as many), there�s one Vedic mantra that has been widely recognized as the quintessential mantra of our dharma.

Even though I�m calling Sanatana Dharma a religion � commonly known as Hinduism � it is actually not a religion but a way of life, a manner of thinking. Therefore, in India�s ancient or medieval history, you will never find an episode of two kings or states going to battle just because they prayed to a different form of God. It is quite remarkable that in a country with tens of languages and hundreds of dialects, a country with extraordinary cultural and historical diversity, where states were eternally fighting territorial and political wars, there had never been any persecution in the name of religion. That�s because Sanatana Dharma allowed peaceful co-existence of contradictions.

Wherever you might have been in this beautiful country, through any period in its several millennia-old history, Sanatana Dharma has stood on four pillars � Gau , cow; Gita , the Bhagavad Gita , which means the Song of the Lord, and is our scripture; Ganga, Mother Ganga; and Gayatri.

Adi Shankaracharya wrote in Bhaja Govindam , �Gaiyam gita naam sahasram, dheyam shripati roopamajasram, neyam sajan sange chitam, deyam deen janaye chavittam .�

The purpose of human life is fourfold. Gaiyam gita naam sahasram; Shankaracharya urges that whenever your mind has a moment to spare, chant the holy names, sing the divine glories and express your gratitude to the Divine. (It�s better than gossiping, sulking or speaking ill of anyone.) Because, as you have heard in my earlier discourses, nothing gives you strength like gratitude, happiness and inner peace. Happiness is a direct outcome of your gratefulness. The more grateful you are, the happier you will feel.

Dheyam shripati roopamajasram : Meditate upon the divine energy. Neyam sajan sange chitam : Spend your time in the company of good people � it�s the hardest thing to do.

When you socialize with other people, you will discover that they spend more of their time gossiping than doing anything else, and it goes beyond the standard exchanging of pleasantries: �Hey, how are you doing today?� It�s just plain gossiping. This weakens you, because when you relax in your free time, your mind always plays back what it had heard during the day. That�s how the mind works. If you don�t feed it garbage, it won�t feed you garbage back.

Shankaracharya said, �Neyam sajan sange chittam.� Spend your time in the company of good people. I once read somewhere that at any point in time, you will discover that you are a reflection of the five most significant people in your life. We become the kind of people we surround ourselves with. The whole premise of meditation, of bhakti , of devotion, is based on this alone � that if I have to derive my inspiration from somebody, let that person not be an ordinary person with ordinary challenges; with ordinary, petty thinking. Let me derive my inspiration from something grand, something extraordinary; something beautiful.

�Deyam deen janaye chavittam� means be charitable to those who are needy. Such a life is useless where you live just for yourself. Somewhere your life has to have meaning. It has to be of use to somebody else, to some other people, because the unfailing law of the universe is whatever you give, it will grow. With that in mind, share your resources with those who need it. So these four pillars of Sanatana Dharma form the basis of a meaningful life, of a purposeful life: So that we speak our words carefully, use our resources judiciously to help ourselves and those around us and be eternally grateful for everything in our lives.

This particular book is about the fourth pillar: the Gayatri mantra. My view is that by the time you finish this book, you will know, a) How to invoke the Gayatri mantra because until you invoke it, you won�t benefit from it and b) Even more importantly, how to put it to use. Merely accumulating the energy of the mantra is not enough, one needs to know how to benefit from it. It�s like having a million dollars in your bank account but not knowing how to withdraw the money; you don�t have any cheque book or an ATM card.

Mantra science is something like that. The wealth that you seek, the spiritual wealth, is inside you. It�s already there. The question is, how do you put it to use? Now, there are many methods and I don�t want to give you more methods. (I did that extensively in my book The Ancient Science of Mantras .) Here, I want to make it extremely simple for you.

A wife was leaving home to go to the market.

She said to her husband, �Honey, I�m going out for a couple of hours, do you need anything from the market?�

He smiled and said, �Thanks, that�s enough!�

Chanting is a little like this. What I am going to share with you may seem like nothing at the end of the day, but depending on your state of mind, this is going to be enough. Notably, mantras, including the Gayatri mantra, have no creators. Mantras have what we call seers, which means rishis or sages who saw them first. So the wisdom is already there � we only need eyes to see it.

Of the four Vedas, Rig Veda is considered the oldest. In the Rig Veda, 3^rd canto, 61^st chapter, Mother Divine is referred to as Usha. Usha means dawn; Usha means daybreak, the first light. Mother Divine is referred to as the light. But it is in the 3^rd canto, 62^nd chapter and 10^th verse where the Gayatri mantra is first featured in any scripture.

The verses in Vedas are organized in meters, called chanda in Sanskrit, and Krishna says, �Gayatri naam chandasaam aham�² (The Bhagavad Gita 10.35). Here, Krishna says, of all the Vedic meters, I am Gayatri. The meter of Gayatri has many mantras, with Gayatri mantra being the most significant. In other words, the meter of the Gayatri mantra is also Gayatri. Under Gayatri chanda , the meter of Gayatri, the Gayatri mantra sits in the 3^rd canto, 62^nd chapter, 10^th verse, and it does not begin with the usual Bhur-bhuvah-svah . The mantra found there is:

Tat-savitur-varenayam

The First Practitioner

The valiant king Kaushika was returning with a large number of men � his troops and his entourage. They were tired and worn out from the long battle they had just won. Passing through the woods, they thought they should camp somewhere but, the trouble was, they had run out of provisions. And without food, even the greatest warriors can�t survive, so the king was concerned. How am I going to feed my people? My soldiers are weary now, I cannot let them starve.

Just as this was going through his mind, one of his ministers said, �There is a small ashram in the woods, the hermitage of Sage Vasishtha. It�s a small place; we will not be able to feed ourselves there, but perhaps we can drink some water and relax a little.�

When they arrived at the ashram, King Kaushika prostrated before the sage who was said to be almost as old as the universe itself. The glow on his face, his flowing white beard, his snow-white matted locks on his medium-built body of wheatish complexion looked as if twilight meeting the morning sun. The king said with reverence, �We would just like to take a short rest here.�

�You look rather tired,� the rishi said, �and your men, exhausted. Rest here for as long as you like, I�ll make meal arrangements for all of you.�

�With due respect, O sage,� the king said with a chuckle, �I don�t think you can feed us all � there are many of us � my entire army is here.�

�You underestimate the power of penance, O king,� Vasishtha replied. �I am a rishi. I can feed and satiate the entire universe except for Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, who are satiated on their own accord alone. The one who does not seek anything, the one who does not need anything from the world, can create anything he so wishes.�

This is one of the greatest secrets of the universe: When you are fulfilled, you can manifest fairly much anything in your life. It�s when we are not fulfilled that we become impatient; we become self-centered. We become tired and narrow-minded. In chasing what we could have had, we lose sight of what we already have.

�You sure? Because I would not want that a few of our men are fed and the others remain unfed. Besides,� Kaushika said, �I don�t see anything here: I don�t see many pupils or disciples of yours. How are you going to cook such a massive meal?�

�Leave that to me,� the rishi said. �Why don�t you all go and take a dip in the river? By the time you get back, hot food will be ready.� The king was now quite intrigued. Nevertheless, he did what he was told, so along with his men, they marched down to the river. Due to rains from the night before, the water was a bit muddy, yet they all bathed. Let alone food, how will he give us even enough clean water to drink? When they returned, they sat down for the meal, and one after the other, they were served � plates full of food along with glasses filled with crystal-clear spring water.

�Eat to your heart�s content,� the sage said. �There is no dearth of anything here.�

Now then, it was only natural that after he had eaten, Kaushika thought, how could he do this? A sage, on his own, feeding a king and his army? It�s unheard of, quite incredible .

�How did you make this happen?� he asked Vasishtha.

�I have a cow, a female calf called Nandini, given to me by Indra, and Indra has a wish-fulfilling cow called Kamadhenu. Nandini is the calf of Kamadhenu, and she fulfills wishes.�

He is a sage, an ascetic. What need does he have for a calf like that? What if I had it in my kingdom. I could feed everybody; I would become supreme. I could travel with my army with just one calf beside us, and she would feed us all. We would never run out of food. We could keep conquering territories after territories.

Kaushika got thinking. This sage does not need all this power. It�s something that should belong to a king.

�So how does this work?� he asked Vasishtha. �This calf, can you request anything of her? Does she grant anything you ask? For instance, if I said, �Fill my treasury with gold�, would she do it?�

�She can grant anything you need in the present moment,� the sage said. He knew where this was going but he kept his calm. �Anything you may require in the future, she cannot, because that goes against the fabric of nature. For nature never hoards; nature exists in the present, progressing from one moment to another. So Nandini only provides whatever you require now.�

�That will also do. I ask you, please give me this calf.�

�I�m sorry, Your Majesty, that cannot happen, because she has come here by grace, and she is treated like a mother. Besides, you are a king; you will use her solely for your material gains. I, however, have used her boons for the welfare of others: to feed hungry people.�

Kaushika was unimpressed. The desire to possess Nandini had taken over, and the basic foundation of Sanatana Dharma � respect for your elders � was crumbling under the weight of ambition. �I am your king and you are in my kingdom, and I am the one who is supporting you. Therefore, I demand that you give me your calf.�

�I seek your forgiveness, but I cannot. Nandini is under my care and protection. She is my gift, and she is Mother Divine to us.�

�Protection?� Kaushika laughed loudly. �You, a lone, aging sage will protect her from my army? Give her to me.� Saying this, he nodded to his chief minister.

Vasishtha kept quiet to indicate his disapproval.

�Well, I will take her then.� The king moved a step in the direction of the calf. This was the beginning of their lifelong discord. �Don�t say I didn�t warn!�

�You cannot,� Vasishtha replied with a chilling conviction and calm in his voice.

�How will you protect yourself?� Kaushika said. �Just take a look at my army. They are powerful like the ocean. They will overwhelm you in no time at all.�

�You may not take Nandini.�

While this ruckus was going on, Kaushika�s men had untied Nandini from her post. Vasishtha immediately moved to the spot where Nandini was and she said to Vasishtha, �Why are you are giving me away? What wish of yours have I not fulfilled? I like it here in the woods. This is my place. I don�t want to go from here.�

�I am not giving you away, O mother,� Vasishtha said. �He is taking you and he is testing me. But you are the mother, and I am your child. I will use the power of my penance but it is with your grace alone. Bless me.�

Vasishtha whispered a mantra and used a kriya called stambhan in Tantra. Stambhan is the method of making anything stop. You can do agni-stambhan , for example, which stops fire, jala- or vayu-stambhan to stop rain or air, and so on. Vasishtha stopped Kaushika�s army. His men were rooted to the spot; they could not move even an inch. Soon, their bodies became unbearably heavy, their joints hurt and extreme depression seeped into their heads. They became suicidal. Several hours passed after which the king apologized and pleaded with Vasishtha to forgive and release him and his army.

Kaushika returned to his palace with the fire of revenge burning his heart, that whisper of a mantra seething his ears. �I was ridiculed and had to beg for forgiveness in front of my own men. I, Kaushika, was defeated by somebody who didn�t even carry a weapon. This is not befitting of my status. I need the power this sage has. In the woods, he is fulfilled. He can manifest anything, and he is protected. I am no longer going to conquer territories and rule. I�m going to attain the power of this sage.� With that, he decided to renounce his kingdom and devote his life to tapas .

Tapas is penance, not in the form of just repentance, but in the form of invocation. With all his fervor, Kaushika prayed to Shiva for 1000 years, the original creator of mantras.

�Varam bhoohi ,� Shiva appeared in his glorious form and said. Ask for a boon.

�I would like the finest weapons, the kind of which that if I used them on anybody, they would stand no chance of survival.�

Shiva granted his request and gave him many weapons, astras � arms that he could dislodge like divine shafts, arrows, sonic missiles � and shastras � the ones he could carry with himself like an impenetrable shield, an unbreakable sword and many others.

Drunk on his revenge still as new as his newly-found powers, he headed straight to Vasishtha�s ashram and roared, �Where are you hiding?� The sun rays sparkling against the shiny, razor-sharp sword he held aloft made him look like an indomitable warrior.

Vasishtha came out of his hermitage, and said, �How can I serve you?�

�Drop all these false niceties, you old fool! Give me Nandini or get ready for a battle! Reject my instruction and I am going to utterly destroy you, this very moment.�

Vasishtha said calmly, his beard flowing in the gentle breeze, �Please, it�s not necessary. I cannot give you Nandini.�

�Then be prepared to die,� Kaushika said, �No one can stop me from taking Nandini today!�

�Try,� was the only word the sage uttered in reply.

One after the other Kaushika unleashed his weapons on Vasishtha. Vasishtha took out his staff � the rishi used to carry a Brahma danda � and held it in front of him. The energy of the weapons Kaushika launched at him was absorbed by the staff. Once Kaushika�s weapons were spent, Vasishtha simply tilted his staff a little, casting a massive orb of energy at him. Kaushika fell down, defeated. �You are my guest,� Vasishtha said. �I will not hurt you anymore. Please leave. Do something better with yourself, and don�t ask for Nandini again.�

Kaushika was foaming at his mouth, his face red like raging fire.

I�ve spent 1000 years on this, and I can�t even get a cow! Shiva�s weapons couldn�t help me at all , he thought. He decided he would pray to Shiva no more. With that, he began invoking Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb, the first cell in creation. I must go to the absolute source of this existence , he decided. One thousand years later, Brahma appeared and granted him his Brahmastra, his most potent weapon. �Take this,� he said. �If there is anything another weapon can do, this weapon can do it better.�

Once again, Kaushika confronted Vasishtha but unfortunately, he met with the same fate. Finally, the king accepted his defeat and the fact that he couldn�t win over Vasishtha. And then realization dawned on him when Vasishtha told him the secret.

�It�s not my power, O king,� the sage said, �it is but who I am. You are not defined by what you have or what you can do, but by who you are, deep inside you.�

�You have been doing all this penance to attain something, but you have forgotten your own attainment: you have not invoked the divinity in you,� he continued. �You are simply carrying some siddhis , supernatural powers, to further your cause. You are not tapping into your real source of power, so you can have all the weapons in the world, but still won�t match me, because for me, my strength is not in this staff,� he said, throwing it away. �It�s in but who I am.�

Hearing this, Kaushika thought: No more am I going to seek weapons or harbor animosity. Instead, I will aim to reach the same level of consciousness, rather superconsciousness, like Vasishtha to whom even Indra bows down and the powers of the universe look up to.

Quietly he took Vasishtha�s leave and sat in searing penance lasting several thousand years. Wishing welfare of all sentient beings, with awakened self and heightened consciousness, he saw the most mystical of all mantras, the one that dispels ignorance. It was clear to Kaushika that enlightenment alone was the answer to everything he sought. From a king eager to conquer territories, he became a sage who ruled hearts. So much so that he was given the title �Vishwamitra� � a friend of the whole world.

But, detached from the world, Vishwamitra wasn�t interested in any titles. After all, he had been an emperor once. Instead, his heart was set on the most supreme knowledge, something that would not only make him another Vasishtha but even better. So what if I wasn�t born a Brahmin? he thought. He could, with his penance, not only purify himself so much that he would be a Brahmin but go even beyond. And beyond he went. With his unrelenting and intense tapas , one by one, siddhis and greater powers came to him. And he absorbed all of it like a giant tree absorbs nutrients from the earth and light from the sun. Vishwamitra acquired such a towering stature that he was regarded as �Brahmarishi� � a Brahmin sage, the highest honor any sage could have.

With his inner eye, he had seen the one mantra, the essence of the Vedas, the cause of creation, the one mantra that had the power to pull anyone out of any adversity, that congregation of divine sounds which could help one realize one�s wildest dreams. The only mantra he ever invoked ever since he left Vasishtha�s ashram � the Gayatri mantra.

The door is wide open, your portal to another dimension of consciousness begins by understanding the power, invocation and realization of the metascience of the Gayatri mantra. As long as you are in this body made up of five elements, you can benefit from this mantra in much the same manner as Vishwamitra and numerous other sages did. In fact, the good news is that since the Gayatri mantra has already been invoked, you and I don�t have to put in the same effort. Someone has already dug the well, you just have to lower the bucket to fill it. At least, that�s been my personal experience in this lifetime.

Let me show how to go about invoking the Gayatri mantra in this day and age in simple and actionable steps. Even if you are not convinced, I only have one thing to say: what harm is there in trying? Besides, you won�t know what all awaits you until you make the first move.

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The Power of Gayatri Mantra

There are many forms of Gayatri, but one particular form is called Savitur Gayatri , which is derived from the word Savitri , the name of Mother Divine, radiant and effulgent. Bear in mind that while Mother Divine, like our solar system, engenders light; until we invoke the light within, the world around us is dark. And there is little hope for the person who remains dark inside.

The Vedas talk about four states of mind: sushupta , when you are sleeping; jagrita , when you are awake; swapana, when you are dreaming, and turiya, when you are beyond. There are also seven planes of existence, of which three are key: bhu , this material plane; bhuvah , the plane of consciousness and svah , our true self, something that is even beyond consciousness. The experience you might go through when you are unconscious is an experience that is beyond consciousness.

Consciousness itself is vital for mantra sadhana. It is essential to remember while chanting any mantra, and certainly the Gayatri mantra, that it�s not about becoming a parrot and keep chanting without any feeling. Some people just want to get through the mantra as if it�s a task they have taken upon themselves: �Good lord, do I want to sit and chant this mantra again? As if I don�t have enough to do in my life, and I have taken upon myself one more thing?�

If you are going to chant the mantra with this sentiment, you will not get any results from it � you may understand, but not benefit from the mantra. This is the most important, qualitative aspect of mantra science, and it simply cannot be ignored. In that sense, it�s not a traditional science � it requires faith.

Another important aspect of mantra science is learning its proper use. When you chant mantras, and when the grace of Mother Divine is fully bestowed upon you, you will realize when and how to use it. That discretion, that sense of discerning wisdom, comes after a long time of mantra sadhana.

Initially when you gain power and sharpened intuition, or when you feel you can bless somebody and make a difference to somebody�s life, you will be tempted to say, �Yes, granted, okay, so be it,� because you want to make others happy. Or worse, you may simply want to impress people. But let�s assume your intention is simply to make others happy. To say, �Oh, this person is bothered by this, let me make him happy.� Or you�ll say, �Oh, granted, you�ll win a million dollars tomorrow,� and so on. If you do that, you will lose the power very quickly indeed � in a matter of weeks, or even days, if you�re not lucky. There is a saying in Hindi, Bandar ke haath ustra lag gaya hai . The monkey�s got a razor in his hands and it�s now just running it over everything it sees.

That�s why when you chant a mantra, it takes time for the energy to come to you: Nature is preparing you so you are ready to provide a real benefit to society.

People will come to you, and only one percent of them will come simply to say, �I am very happy, I just wanted to express my gratitude.� Ninety-nine percent of people will come to you with problems, almost all of whom would believe they are not the cause of them. If someone believes he is not the cause of his problem, how can we solve it? If he believes that something else is causing the issue, and says, �Fix the problem, but don�t tell me to do anything, because I am not the cause of it,� you might say, �Okay, your problem will be solved.�

There was this person in Canada � and I am telling you his real-life story, which I witnessed over a period of time. When I first met him in India, he was a devout worshipper of the Gayatri mantra. He was the first one whom I saw who actually had Gayatri siddhi . Siddhi is when a mantra becomes your own and you become the mantra; the energy of the mantra works through you, lives in you, benefitting other people. He blessed and helped many people sail through difficult circumstances in life.

When I first met him, this man�s radiance was extraordinary. He had such a beautiful, effulgent face; you could look at him all day, and still feel as if you were receiving the love, warmth, divinity and grace that flowed from him. Those were the days when I did a lot of astrology � I was 15 years old then.

This sadhaka�s dedication was phenomenal. He had been chanting the Gayatri mantra, 16 rounds, every day. One round of chanting is 108 times. Every day for roughly 40 years, he never missed his chanting routine.

I�ll digress for a moment to tell you a little incident from his life. The factory where he used to work got a big order once, so they asked everybody to put in half a shift more each day. That way, two people could do 12 hours� work each in different shifts, so the factory could have 24 hours of production. This was back in the early nineties.

He said to his boss, �Look, I am sorry, I cannot stay back, because at 3 pm I have to leave. I have to do my own thing then � it�s my personal time.�

�You have been with this company for 20 years,� his boss said. �You know how big this order is for us. And it�s not as if we�re not paying you. We will pay you double the usual amount for the overtime. All we are asking is that you extend your work day for four hours, and only for eight or nine weeks.�

He said, �Sorry, I can�t do that.�

�That�s not going to sit well with anybody. You�re the supervisor. What kind of example are you going to set?�

�I�m sorry, I need to put food on the table, but I cannot stay beyond 3 pm.�

The manager became quite upset. The matter went to the department head, and he had a meeting. He said the same thing and then it went all the way to the CEO. Because he had been working at the factory for 20 years, they couldn�t just fire him. They needed people with the technical know-how who could fulfill the order.

�I�m at my wits� end,� the CEO said. �Why do you have to go at 3 pm? Why can�t you stay back for four hours, just for a few weeks? Tell me, what is the problem? Won�t you be happy if this company grows?�

�It�s a personal thing,� he replied. �I have to go and meet somebody.�

�You don�t exactly look like a teenager in love. Whom do you have to meet every day that you can�t miss? Can�t you meet him or her at 7 pm?�

�I must reach home by 4 pm, when I sit down and have my meeting.�

�But with whom?� the CEO asked, a bit flustered. �Whom do you have to meet?�

I am not adding any of my own words. This is exactly how I heard this from the man himself.

�Well, I have to meet the person who gave me this job,� he said.

�This is the craziest thing I�ve ever heard,� the CEO said, throwing his hands in the air. �What are you talking about? I gave you this job. This is my damn company!� Then the CEO thought, perhaps there was some agent involved. This guy is a poor immigrant, so there must have been an agent who is taking a commission or some work from the employee that he is unaware of.

So he said, �Oh I get it! Is there some kind of agent in between us? But, I gave you this job myself.�

�No, there�s no agent, but I can tell you whom I must meet at 4 pm every day.�

�Pray tell,� the CEO said, exasperated.

�Do you know Jesus?� this man asked.

�If you mean Jesus Christ, then of course, I know him.�

�Well, I go home to meet his father. I pray to Krishna.�

For 40 years this person had never missed his routine of Gayatri mantra chanting. Every day, he chanted 16 rounds of the mantra and two rounds of Hare Krishna Mahamantra, followed by reading one chapter from the Bhagavad Gita . He was a householder and worked a full-time job until he was 60 years old. This is the level of self-discipline and faith that is required if you really want to succeed on the path of mantra sadhana.

The CEO, for the record, marked on his file to never to bother this guy again: Let him do whatever he wants to do after 3 pm; let him go where he wants to go, in his own time. He worked till he retired from this company, by the way. Look at his faith. So often we think that people who are just mediums in our lives are our everything, that without their grace we won�t live. That�s not true. They are simply the medium. �Ja par kripa raam ki hoi, taa par kripa kare sab koi. � (If the Divine is in your favor, the whole world will be too.)

A very senior bureaucrat once wrote to me saying, �The chief minister used to love me, but now the CM is against me, and I am being framed,� and so forth. He was very keen that I get his email, so I wrote him one line in return.

I wrote, �Did you do anything wrong?�

He replied, �No.�

Then I wrote back to him, �You don�t have anything to worry about. Drop all your fears.� He wrote to me again a few days later.

He said, �It�s miraculous! I don�t know how it happened, but just yesterday evening I managed to meet the cabinet secretary and the principal secretary. Everybody is on my side, and people who were against me are now saying that I was actually doing the right thing. But I just need to be back in the good books of the chief minister, because he�s the man, after all.�

Then I wrote back to him, �You have missed the point completely. The chief minister is not the maker of your destiny; he is just the medium. You just focus on doing the right thing, and the right things will follow automatically.�

It�s worth remembering here that when your faith is strong, no adversity in life can shake you. Otherwise, every little incident becomes a huge episode. Each minor hurdle, every small challenge looks like a mountain to climb, which it isn�t. You have made it into a mountain, but it is nothing. Keep doing what you have to do, and you will make your own way.

In any event, when we chant a mantra such as the Gayatri mantra, we are not asking any supernatural being to help us. Instead, we are invoking our own latent energy; we are invoking the power within us. Associating it with a deity of some kind is a matter of meditation; of better focus, visualization and manifestation.

Anyway, I was telling you about this sadhaka in Canada who devoutly meditated on Gayatri. He told me some of the things he was doing for people to help them. Many people began approaching him to fulfill their material objectives.

�Don�t you think,� I said to him, �that using the power of Gayatri mantra only to fulfill material desires is misusing it? Today you will make somebody happy, but tomorrow they will come to you with another problem, followed by another and another.�

�I am using the energy while it�s working for me,� he said.

�Well, if there was a way to make somebody happy eternally, we would gladly do that, but this doesn�t exist,� I said to him, �using a mantra in this manner is like making a toilet brush out of a large inheritance of gold.�

Now fast-forward seven years, when I saw him again, I could not even recognize him. He looked like a mango that had been sucked dry and cast aside. He had lost his radiance and spiritual potency. The power in his voice had diminished noticeably, the charisma had disappeared. It was as if Mother Gayatri had decided, �I don�t want to live in you anymore.�

I spoke with him, and we talked about what had come about. We had known each other for years and he believed in me a great deal because one, many a time in the past I�d done his astrological charts and two, I was a practitioner of mantras myself. Many a time, we even compared our sadhana notes.

�How can I regain my lost power?� he asked me.

�Stop meeting people,� I told him. �And if you cannot stop seeing people, then don�t just say to them that Mother Divine would grant their wish, instead simply pray to Mother to do whatever is right for them. Because fulfilling their desires is not helping people. They don�t know what�s right for them, do they?�

Consider this for a moment: Do we always know what we really want? And when we get it, are we ever any happier? Usually not. After a short time, we are back to feeling the way we felt before.

So this sadhaka completely stopped granting people�s wishes, and believe it or not, in another 14 years, he started looking radiant again. But he no longer blesses people the way he used to.

It is the duty of every sadhaka to bless, though, because we don�t earn everything for ourselves. We are not performing a mantra just to benefit ourselves � that�s a very limited view. Of course, we have to help others, but we need to know how to help. We cannot say, �Okay, nothing bad will happen to you.� Or, at least, we should very rarely say that. I say that to less than 0.05 percent of the people I meet.

Mostly, what comes from me is this: Mother Divine, you know what�s going on, and you know everything, so you decide � you decide what your grace is. This person is thinking, if I have my way, that is grace, but usually, this is not the case.

In fact, a good prayer would be, �God, please don�t listen to me. I think I am very smart, I think I�ve got it all figured out, but that�s really not the truth. So please, if you will, don�t listen to me.� I think this is the greatest prayer. You can�t go wrong then.

At any rate, after what he went through, this sadhaka changed his prayer to, �O God! O Mother, please live in my mind, live in my consciousness, then I will not feel anything negative.� That means I will not think anything negative;

I will not contemplate anything negative � therefore, I won�t do anything negative. If I don�t do anything negative, I won�t have to suffer anything adverse. It is as simple as that. This is a much better, more beneficial prayer in my view.

Getting back to the Gayatri mantra, the reason I have taken the time to give you a background of the mantra and mantra science is because by following a certain discipline, day in, day out, some of you � maybe 5 or 10 percent of you � are actually going to achieve success with the mantra. You will then be able to help yourself and others. If, at that time, you already understand what you have tapped into, and know the power of what you have, you will use it wisely and judiciously.

Gayatri mantra is considered the seed of all Vedic mantras in the sense that on the path of mantra yoga, no mantra can be invoked until we first perform the invocation of Vedmata Gayatri, which is done by chanting the Gayatri mantra a night prior to starting any purushcharana . It is the method of seeking her permission. Savitur or Savitri, the presiding deity of the Gayatri mantra, is called �Vedmata�, the Mother of all Vedas.

The structure of this mantra is referred to as Chatushpadi : chatush means four and padi means limbs, which corresponds to the four Vedas and four pauses in the mantra. Of the four pauses in the Gayatri mantra, the one in the Vedas starts with �Tat-savitur-varenyama bhargo �� But the sages of yore invoked it with the three prefixes of bhu, bhuvah, svah. So the complete mantra becomes:

�Om Bhurbhuvah Svah,� first pause,

Four Stages of Sound

If you have ever attended any of my meditation camps or discourses in person, then you must know that I always begin them with a short invocation and by offering my obeisance to the divine in you. I then quietly whisper, Narayani Namostute , which means that I bow down to that divine energy. I thought rather than offering you information on various stages of attainment based on age-old texts, I may as well offer you my own perspective, in my voice, based on my own experience in the present age.

When I say that I offer my obeisance to the divine in you, I actually mean it. It�s not simply a matter of making a statement for me. It�s a profound expression of how I feel about each living entity that I encounter. When you continually meditate on Divine Mother, you start to see her in everything. You see her in everybody, and people � their faces, bodies, colors and features � simply disappear. The first thing that comes in front of you is the form of Devi.

The first layer is Devi, Goddess, Energy, Divinity, whatever name you want to give, and the second layer is light. I see everybody as a light. Then the light disappears, and the third layer that I see is the actual human body. It wasn�t like this before; it�s not that it has been like this since I was born. This experience came about after my intense sadhana in the Himalayas. And the presence of the divine energy of Mother Divine is so real in my life that I really hope by the time you finish this book, that you would walk away with enough inspiration, as well as learning, to manifest the same in your life.

When that happens, the conflict between you and others will lessen drastically. You begin to flow gently with life. This does not mean you become weak � you remain strong; you know when to be firm and when to be soft. But you no longer use words to hurt others. When your speech becomes pure, with a pure heart and a pure mind, you become an embodiment of purity. Purity and light are synonyms of enlightenment, of freedom; while the impure is trapped and confined, the pure is eternally liberated.

Ultimately, the whole sadhana of Gayatri is to purify yourself. Otherwise, chanting has little meaning at the end of the day. If we fail to purify ourselves internally, then no mantra will ever yield any siddhis or powers. And siddhis will come to you, simply if you are purified.

Sometimes, people ask me, �Do you read minds?� or �How do you know who I am or my past, present or future?� You know, it�s not that I sat down and chanted any specific mantra to invoke that kind of energy in me. Although there are some sadhanas that claim to do that, I never did them.

For example, there is a sadhana of a pishachini called Karna Pishachini . Karna is your ear and pishachini is a lower form of energy. It is said that Devi speaks in your ear. It�s a tantric sadhana of the left-handed path.

My guru, Naga Baba, who was a great tantric, once picked up his cellphone and said, �Beta , this is karna pishachini . Yeh karna pishachini hai ; she is next to your ear and tells you everything.� He was referring to his phone. This is the uber-connected lifestyle we have in this day and age. Anyway, it�s not that I did any sadhana for that � it just happened naturally.

Through performing the mantra properly, a good meditator, a sadhaka , will naturally start to see through people, because the layers of various entities are peeled away. Then, you are not listening to people�s words; you don�t have to see their intentions; you are not looking at their bodies. Instead, you are connected on a different level altogether and when you are connected, you and that person are one at that point in time. You feel what that other person is feeling; you see what the other person is saying, and you recall what the other person knows. This connection is what truly differentiates an ordinary person from somebody purified; somebody who has really walked the path of the light, or in other words, this is the difference between an aspirant and adept.

For this level of spiritual attainment, you can never ignore the quality of our sadhanas. It�s just as important for your wellbeing. What is the sense in chanting mantras, when you feel increasingly restless in your mind; when you feel just as angry, hurt, jealous and negative as you felt before you undertook any sadhana? Never overlook or underestimate the importance of purifying yourself. Otherwise, we are just being parrots when we chant.

A man went to a pet shop, where there was a parrot in a cage, constantly chanting, �Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom.�

The man said to the shopkeeper, �Does it only know one word?�

�No,� the shopkeeper replied, �this parrot knows one more word,� and the parrot started chanting, �Liberation, liberation, liberation.�

�That�s an enlightened parrot; I�d like to buy it.� And so he bought the parrot and took it home.

All day, the parrot kept chanting, �Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom,� and the man�s wife said, �Why don�t you set this poor bird free? It will thank you.� The man thought, this is a kind gesture; I can certainly do this much . So, he opened the cage door, and said, �Okay birdie, the door is open. Off you go, fly away, my fine-feathered friend.� But the parrot stayed on its perch and kept chanting, �Freedom, freedom, freedom,� because it never understood what freedom was.

Chanting a mantra without awareness is like chanting �Food, food, food,� and expecting your hunger to be satisfied � as if you could say, �shahi paneer �, �dosa�, �idli� or �pasta�, and no need to feed yourself. If you reduce a mantra to a verbal activity, chanting recklessly just to finish the rounds, it won�t take you anywhere.

There are four kinds of chanting, which lead to four progressive stages of sound. The first kind of chanting is called vachika , which means audible, verbal; something you speak. In vachika , Gayatri japa would be you chanting out loud, others around you can hear you easily. It is the most base level of japa . It will quickly tire you, and create restlessness in the mind if done over a prolonged period of time.

The second type of japa is called upanshu � your lips move, and you make only a whispering sound. It is like talking when you don�t want to be heard. Two people in love, when close to each other, often whisper than talk out loud.

Sometimes, my mother�s friends used to come home and talk like this. We would be sitting almost next to them and not know what they were saying. So it is with upanshu : only somebody who is no more than a few feet away from you can hear you. Upanshu japa is more effective than vachika .

The third kind of chanting is called mansika where you recall the whole mantra in your mind. There is no way I can demonstrate that. Usually, the mind keeps on talking, so rather than letting the mind ramble on, saying whatever it wants, mansika japa is making the mind say the particular mantra you are chanting.

Please note that mansika japa is not simply chanting the mantra in your mind, because that would simply be your mind chattering away. Instead, it is recalling the mantra in your mind � recollecting the mantra. In one moment you can only recall one thing. When you are simply chanting, speaking in your mind, part of your mind is elsewhere. Your mind is saying, Om bhur-bhuvah svah tatsavitur-varenayama bhargo devasya dhimahi, but you are thinking, I have to make that phone call , I have to reply to that email ; this person is waitingfor me . That person wronged me , and I am not going to spare him; I�m just going to get on the phone and tell him what I think .

If the mind is talking but only one aspect of the mind is chanting, that chanting is as good as useless. A more effective way of chanting is gentle and conscious recollection of your mantra. Picture a tap that�s dripping, one drop after the other. Imagine that you are recalling in your mind the mantra between drips, that each section of the mantra is falling from the crown of your head one drop at a time: Om bhur-bhuvah svah, drip, tatsavitur-varenayama, drip, bhargo devasya dhimahi, drip, dhiyo yo nah pracodayata, drip. When you are recalling the mantra this way, your mind will concentrate better and your other thoughts will not intrude. It�s a very subtle technique that I have figured out after years of practice and it has made a tremendous difference to the outcome I have gained from mantras.

For years I practiced mantra chanting without any significant results but the day I figured out how chanting was done properly, the impact of it changed. I began to notice some of the blessings that the scriptures promised.

It was not complete though, and to devote myself fully to my path of tapas , I left everything behind and went to the caves and woods. There I devoted my time to invoking a mantra in the sense that the Devi, the deity of the mantra, would come in front of me and talk to me. That�s one of the ultimate achievements a mantrin � somebody who practices a mantra is called a mantrin � can attain.

The fourth japa , the ultimate one, is called ajapa . If you add �a� in front of japa , it means the opposite of japa . Therefore, ajapa means you are not actually chanting � the mantra is chanting itself. With practice, you will get a grip over this. Some people will understand it in a matter of hours, for some it may be days, while for others it could be weeks. But if you stay on course, you�ll understand what I am trying to say here.

While in the woods, I used to sit for very long hours � one straight stretch of ten hours, and then get up and do another stretch of six hours, and so on. It was very tiring: I would just sit like this and mentally chant (read recall) my mantra. At the end of every session, I would mark myself. And if during the ten hours I turned my head because there were rats and other creatures there distracting me, I would immediately deduct five marks out of ten, because my goal was to sit still like a rock, unmoving.

Sometimes, when I would cry out for Devi in devotion, it would actually interrupt my meditation, because tears would roll down my cheeks. It was icy cold, and when the tears emerged they were warm, but by the time they rolled down my cheeks, they were cold and my body consciousness rose.

When you sit still for long hours with extraordinary stillness and supreme concentration, you lose awareness of your body for a sustained period of time. You are sitting, you are mentally aware, but the body is not there anymore. This is not something I experienced on a daily basis, but this would happen often during long periods of meditation. For this, I would do a breathing technique and sometimes lose consciousness. In the beginning, when I would lose consciousness, I used to fall. There was a little wooden plank on the wall. The wall was also made of wooden planks, and my head would hit against the plank when I fell, and then I would come back to consciousness.

Sometimes my immersion in my japa was so intense, that while doing that breathing technique, I would hit my head against the wall and then return to consciousness after a minute or two. I knew the exact time, because I had a digital clock, so I would always know how I was doing against time if I were to keep my eyes open.

The most beautiful thing was that returning to consciousness was not like the flick of a switch. It was more like the coming of the dawn, so it would happen over a minute or so, and the first thing that would happen was, I would hear distant sounds such as people talking � sometimes, people talking about me. At that time, few people knew me � perhaps only a few hundred. Of those, 10 or 15 people may have been talking. There was not a day when my mother and my siblings did not think about me.

Sometimes, at the time I returned to consciousness, I would hear those distant conversations. Then, as I would regain my consciousness, I would only hear the mantra. Was the mantra going on when I was unconscious? I don�t know. But this happened unfailingly when I did that breathing technique. Through this, I understood what ajapa actually entails: The moment you are in your consciousness, your mantra is chanting constantly within a part of you. So ajapa is not something you can do � ajapa is something that happens to you.

This is much like meditation. In the beginning, you do meditation, but as you progress, meditation happens to you. Ajapa is the ultimate state for a mantrin in terms of elevating your practice and taking it to the ultimate level. But you have to become one with the mantra, such that you may become the mantra itself; nothing but a vibration of the mantra. Every pore of your existence starts to reverberate with the sound of your mantra.

When you do japa in these four stages, it gives birth to four kinds of sounds. The first type of sound is vaikhari . Vaikhari is something that is produced artificially, by a person. When I am speaking, my tongue is touching my teeth or my palette and is producing some sound � that is vaikhari . Nature cannot produce this sound. Somebody, some element or entity in the play of nature creates the sound.

The second is madhyama . Madhyama is a sound that comes about by human intervention, but not created entirely by a person. Examples of madhyama could be the sound of someone slapping a tree or his thigh. With this clapping sound, I have not spoken anything.

The third is pashyanti , where absolutely no human intervention gives rise to the sound. The rustling of leaves is a good example of this. Pashyanti means the one that can be seen, or that which witnesses. You can see the fluttering of leaves and you can also hear the rustling sound they make.

The fourth sound is para , which means the one that is beyond, or absolute. When you do ajapa or when you do the japa and this kind of chanting happens to you � and even in the third kind, mansika japa � you start to move towards para , one of the finer states of consciousness.

I will give you a little analogy, which demonstrates what I mean by consciousness. Picture a very still lake � there is not a sound, there is not a breath of wind, it is very quiet. On the bed of the lake, a tiny bubble forms. It�s barely visible when it is at the bottom, but as it rises through the water, it becomes progressively bigger, and when it emerges, it�s a huge bubble and makes ripples across the lake�s surface.

Something similar happens with your consciousness when it is not under your control. Like tiny bubbles, thoughts or emotions come from the depths of your mind. As they rise within you, you feel increasingly out of control and they bubble to the surface, causing you disturbance. But if your consciousness is truly calm, no thoughts or emotions will form in the first place.

Physical chanting creates its own, small disturbances. When you do vachika japa , the first kind of japa where you do vaikhari sound, it�s like tiny bubbles popping at the surface, because you are producing that sound. With the second kind, madhyama , the bubbles only form, but don�t rise. While performing mansika japa , the bubbles actually travel to the surface. With the fourth, the para � while performing ajapa � no bubbles form in the water.

That stillness of the mind is the first requirement for experiencing the Divine in its truest sense, which is when you want to experience the divine energy � not just want to use it for your or others� benefit, but for its own sake.

For this, the mind has to be still, like that lake. With no bubbles in that stillness, you experience extraordinary bliss and crystal-clear awareness. When you chant in such pristine awareness, every word you utter will have a tremendous impact on your consciousness. There is only one way to gain that state, and that is practice � there is no other way that I know of.

Without practice, you may have intermittent or occasional experiences, but ultimately, these mean little. They don�t mean that you are progressing unless you manifest a purity within you; unless you find yourself less angry at the world; unless you find yourself softer, mellower and more compassionate. Because a true spiritual experience is always transformational. If it hasn�t transformed you, it is not a true experience � at least in the spiritual sense.

A disciple once asked his guru, �How do I gauge my spiritual progress? I have been chanting, I have been doing everything you have been telling me, but how do I know if I am progressing?�

The master said, �Just write down how many times you get disturbed in a day, and how many times you get upset over little things.�

If you get upset very quickly, that means you are not progressing spiritually. If earlier you would get upset ten times in a day and now you only get upset five times a day, you are definitely progressing, because ultimately your spiritual progress must show through.

If you say to yourself, �Oh, I have done 1,00,000 japa ,� it really means nothing, it�s like playing a tape � that parrot-tape.

A doctor had two parrots that were always chanting: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare . One day, the doctor went to a friend who had a female parrot that used to swear a lot, and he was appalled. He said, �This parrot is using such harsh words, and I have two parrots that are so spiritual.�

His friend suggested that if he left his female parrot with the doctor�s parrots for a week or two, she might learn something � she might become more spiritual. The doctor thought that was not a bad idea at all. That, they would benefit much from it, too. So he took the swearing female parrot back home, and he left her in the cage with his parrots. The two parrots were going, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, and then they saw the female parrot. One of them stopped, but the other one kept chanting, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare . The one that stopped said, �Hey, man, shut up! Our prayers have been answered, we can calm down now.�

We don�t want to be like those spiritual parrots. Be absolutely clear: chanting is not done to have your prayers answered. You pray when you want something, you don�t chant. You don�t chant the Gayatri mantra or any kind of mantra to have your wishes granted. You chant a mantra because you want to invoke the divinity within; to gain immense inner strength; to constantly purify yourself. With that purification and inner strength, everything would become plain sailing. Maybe you wouldn�t even need to pray.

A good prayer would never ask God for something, anyway. A good prayer would not say, �God, please give me this or that.� This is begging, not praying. A good prayer would simply express gratitude. But let�s say your �prayer� entails asking the divine in you or outside � or a deity of your belief � for safety or health or sound finances or whatever else you want. That�s not praying, but if you are praying, then stick to praying. Don�t shift to mantra chanting for this.

Mantra chanting is supposed to invigorate you and your consciousness, to stir things up. For a while after you take up mantra chanting, you are going to experience a kind of upheaval in your life � everything will become topsy-turvy in the beginning. Then you will start to align yourself. A mantra is not chanted to fulfill our desires � for that, you have other options.

Mulla Nasruddin met his friend after a long time. He offered to take Mulla out for a drink.

�No, I no longer drink,� said Mulla.

�You don�t drink anymore? Why? What�s wrong?�

�I quit drinking.�

�Fine,� his friend said. �Let�s at least have a smoke.�

�Sorry, I quit smoking too.�

�You quit?� his friend asked. �Is your health okay? Let�s go to the casino then.�

�I don�t gamble anymore,� Mulla said.

�But why?�

�Well, I had a girlfriend, and she told me that she would marry me only if I stopped fooling around and stopped drinking and smoking.�

�Oh, when did you stop?�

�It�s almost been a year.�

�And are you married now?� his friend asked.

�No.�

�Why not?�

�Well, after I became so good and sober,� Mulla said, �I figured I had plenty of other options, and I did not have to marry her anymore.�

Chanting is to sober up. And once you do that, a whole world of options will open up for you.

In my book on mantras, I have talked about various kinds of beads and how they are used for different sadhanas. Most rosaries will have 108 beads; the one at the top is the 109th bead. We don�t chant on this bead. It is simply to mark the beginning or the ending, depending on which way you look at it. It�s called the sumeru , and we don�t actually cross the sumeru when we chant the mantra.

The first finger is called the tamasic finger, which means it represents the mode of darkness, ignorance � tamoguna . The second finger represents the mode of passion. The third finger, the ring finger, represents the mode of goodness. The first finger is kept away when we do any sattvic chanting, which is clean or chanting of the right-handed path. Chanting can be of dakshinacara , the right-handed path, or vamachara , the left-handed path. Vamachara is outside the scope of my current exposition.

We rest the rosary on the ring finger supported by the thumb, and the second finger is used to move the beads. The thumb is called Brahma.

Now when I am at the last bead, I should not cross the sumeru. Instead, I have to turn the beads around and start again. This is how we chant with beads. You are welcome, even in your daily lives, to put these beads around your neck once you have finished chanting. Or you can put them back in your bag or put the bag around your neck, or you can leave the bag out � that�s your personal choice. There are no hard and fast rules here.

The main rule with chanting, though, is to not cross the sumeru . If you are chanting and you lose your focus and drop the beads within the bag, for example, don�t try to find where you were. Just start from the beginning.

I don�t usually advise my more advanced disciples to chant on beads, because when you chant on beads, there is a tendency to rush through the chants.

You might say, �Hey Swami, I did my round in three minutes!� This is quite pathetic; it�s not an achievement at all. So usually, instead of chanting with beads � or even while chanting with beads � I set a minimum time (rather than a minimum count). Hence, my own six-or-seven-or-ten-hour stretches. If I say, �I am going to sit like this and chant for ten hours,� my mind will not rush � my mind will say, �Oh, he has committed to ten hours� chanting.� Even if I finish quickly, my mind will not disturb me sooner.

It�s just a matter of awareness. Because believe me, if you don�t chant with awareness, you�ll say, �Thank God, one more round done. Now, let me move to the next one.� It should not be like this. It is not going to be enjoyable in the beginning but it should not be a torture either, so you should kind of like it.

Anyway, beads can be powerful reminders. In some sense, they�re a little like robes. My guru, Naga Baba, used to say that wearing a robe is like a speed breaker: You won�t go to a cinema, a theatre or a restaurant while wearing a robe � although we go to restaurants all the time, and don�t feel out of place. But at least, as he said, there are many places you would automatically avoid while wearing a robe.

All religions of the world have certain symbols, and those symbols are there to remind us, whether it�s a hat of some kind, a turban, something we wear around our necks, beads, a cross or a Star of David, or whatever. They are there to remind us of how we ought to lead our lives; what kind of principles we have committed ourselves to. Such as it is with the beads when you wear them � they remind you what you stand for.

To summarize, you can use beads in the beginning, and once you are finished chanting, you can wear them. Some people will write down this question tomorrow and ask me if I don�t answer it today: If you go to the washroom, can you wear your beads? And in certain kinds of acts can you wear the beads? And so on. By all means, it�s up to you. I don�t want to saddle you with more rules. I am here to simplify everything on the path of mantra sadhana.

Very few people fall in love with their chanting, with their beads. For those lucky few who do, taking out your rosary and chanting your beautiful mantra is one of the most peaceful activities you can undertake.

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Three Forms of Mantra Sadhana

All mantra sadhanas fall into three categories. The first is called nitya karma . Nitya means something that�s done routinely. Nitya karma is like attending school: you put on a uniform, go there and mark your presence. Though in itself this has some relevance, it doesn�t mean much per se. But you go to school, get familiar with the learning environment, see other children, and so on.

Nitya karma is what a seeker does on a regular basis: it is refreshing your mind, practicing what you already know, every day.

Ramakrishna Paramahansa had three gurus; one of his gurus was a Naga saint named Totapuri.

Ramakrishna once asked him, �You have attained nirvikalpa samadhi , that rare and arguably the highest form or emancipation. Why, then, do you still meditate?�

�You see that water pot?� Totapuri pointed to his water pot, which was made of brass, and said, �If you don�t wash it daily, it gathers stains and spots. Therefore, I meditate a little every day to sustain the purification that I have done with intense sadhana.�

You should make what you do sitting in front of an altar part of your routine; make it your daily discipline so that you refresh what you already know. That, however, does not usually give you the power you may need from mantras for certain accomplishments.

For that, there is a different kind of sadhana called naimittika karma . And it is what really differentiates an ascetic, an adept from an average seeker.

Naimittika karma is something that is done with a specific purpose in mind. Doing naimittika karma entails devoting a certain time for your sadhana. For example, you could say, �I am going to chant this mantra over the next 40 days, 1,25,000 times,� or �I am going to chant it 2,00,000 times or 40,000 times,� and so on and so forth. It is like a fixed deposit in your spiritual bank account. What you do during that period of time is what you accumulate for future use.

When you do naimittika karma , you will gain some energy from your chanting. One of the common mistakes that people make with mantra sadhana is that they become eager to use it. I will give you an example; I wasn�t thinking of citing it earlier, but it is surely relevant.

In 1999, I initiated a very nice person, a householder, into a specific mantra. Let�s call him Tarun.

�Somewhere,� I said to him, �I�m taking a risk by initiating you in this mantra. The only thing I ask of you is that please don�t use it without consulting me. There is a reason I am telling you this, because one day you will need it for something in your family, for one of your children.�

�Is everything going to be all right?� Tarun asked.

�Yes, but we�ll need the energy of this mantra.�

About eight years later, one of his cousin�s uncles, an old man, fell gravely ill. Tarun went to see him at the hospital and couldn�t bear to see him suffering. He asked me if he could use the mantra to help the old man, so he could leave this world peacefully.

�This soul�s departure is only a matter of time,� I replied. �Save this power, you will need it.� But he couldn�t contain himself. In his next visit, he saw his cousin crying, and the uncle in great pain and he sat there and applied the mantra. This was in the morning.

At around 3 pm, the same day, his uncle left his body.

�I am sorry,� Tarun said to me over the phone, �but I could not resist using the mantra. Since I did not use it for my own benefit � after all, I helped somebody � so I think it should be all right.�

�While it is not untrue that you used the energy of the mantra for somebody else, it�s not entirely true either, because you used it out of a sense of attachment,� I contended. �There were other patients in the hospital. You did not go to them and say, �I am liberating you.� You helped somebody to whom you were attached, one way or the other. So while that is commendable, it was not entirely selfless. Your emotions got the better of you, and you used your energy just like that.�

Fast-forward a few years, and a young person in his family was diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately, with the right medical and spiritual intervention, this storm passed.

With great power comes great responsibility. Uncle Ben in Spiderman said that � one wise fellow.

If you are going to accumulate energy, you also have a great responsibility to not use it just for yourself. It would be ideal also to confine yourself to using it for those to whom you are not connected, or at least use it for some people whom you do not know. This requires great mindfulness, because when you look around, everybody is disturbed or in pain in one way or the other. Everyone is in need. How you intervene makes a great deal of difference to yours as well as that person�s life, because if you are interfering in the play of nature, somewhere, you must pay the price. Your intervention has to be done in accordance with nature, which is part of naimittika karma .

Under naimittika karma is a concept called purushcharana. Purushcharana is invoking a mantra and saving its energy for future use. It is always done over a specific period of time, and later in this book, I share the steps of purushcharana . Once you have done the purushcharana, you have accumulated the necessary spiritual wealth. Then, the third step is kamya prayoga .

Kamya means desired or desirable and prayoga means application. When you use a mantra for a certain application, that is kamya prayoga . Of these three aspects of mantra science, the second, naimittika karma , is the most important and the primary focus of this book.

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Performing the Gayatri Sadhana

One amazing thing about performing the Gayatri sadhana is that you notice a general rise in your body temperature within the first few days of starting your purushcharana . Don�t be alarmed if that happens. Chanting the Gayatri mantra stimulates the solar channel in our body. Savitur Gayatri, the mantra we are concerned with in this book, has since times immemorial been chanted while standing in the river. For, savitur also means sun. Offering libations towards the sun while standing in water is an age-old practice.

Gayatri worshippers would chant this mantra while standing in a river, lake or an ocean, with water sometimes up to their knees, waists, or even up to their chests, depending on which lineage they belonged to. This is not just physical but psychical heat. The Tibetans call it tummo . I have found that what they do with a set of yogic practices to stimulate tummo , Gayatri mantra accomplishes a nearly similar outcome plus more.

From firsthand experience, I can confirm this mantra generates heat in your body. Once when I was in Canada, I had some time to myself � this was before I renounced. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had a meeting on a Friday; I heard from my client that the meeting would be postponed to the following Tuesday. I thought, I now had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday free, and I didn�t want to sit at home and do nothing or just play golf, etc.

Intending to make good use of my time, I decided to go away and do a little purushcharana of the Gayatri mantra. It obviously wasn�t my first sadhana � I had done many purushcharanas by then and I knew how long I could sit, etc. So I figured I would chant the mantra up to 12 hours a day: three stretches of four hours, interspersed with three-hour breaks. I looked online for suitable places to avoid chanting at home or in a hotel room � I wanted a quiet, secluded place.

Fortunately, I found a rental caravan advertised on some website, so I left a message right away but no one called back. After waiting another couple of hours, I found two more places and left messages on their voicemails. No one called back. Meanwhile, it was evening and I went to play badminton. I thought why to waste my evening waiting for a phone call. It was better to get some blood circulation going.

Three hours later, when I finished and turned my phone on, there was a message on it from the caravan lady. It was nearly 8 pm by then. I called her back and she said, �Okay, you can take that place, no problem. But nobody lives there; it�s totally isolated. Are you aware of that?�

�Yes,� I said.

�And there�s no running water.�

�No problem.�

�No flushing toilet either.�

�Uh� okay� no problem.�

�It�s next to a lake, far into the woods.�

�Sounds pretty nice!�

�Come to my place first,� she said, �give me the money, then I�ll give you the key.�

It was only 50 bucks a day.

�Fair enough,� I said to her.

I went home and said to my brother � and sister-in-law, who always took care of me as a mother would � �I am going away for a few days.� They were quite used to me heading off on the spur of the moment. My sister-in-law quickly said, �Let me at least pack a quilt for you and something to eat.�

I said, �I won�t be eating anything; don�t bother packing any stuff for me.�

I drove for hours. This place was quite far, and I put it on my GPS. It was way off the beaten track, and the GPS was going haywire. I was feeling bad for driving my brother�s BMW on these unpaved roads. Somehow, I managed to reach the owner�s place after midnight. I knocked on her door, and she said, �I am quite intrigued, because just last week I lost my sister, and she used to spend a fair bit of time in that caravan. Then I got a message from you saying you would like to rent my caravan for meditation. This must be God�s mysterious way and not a coincidence.�

The caravan was 20 minutes away from her place, she told me, and that it was not locked and that there was no key because no one went there. But now that I was at her place, I could give her the rent first.

�Tomorrow morning you can drive back here,� she said. �I can give you bread, milk and juice or something.�

�Don�t worry,� I said. �I won�t be eating anything. I have a bottle of orange juice.� I had decided that I would take three sips of orange juice a day.

�Are you sure?�

�Positive.�

�Well, if you change your mind, just give me a call. Don�t die, you know.�

I chuckled and said, �I�ll be fine!�

I went to the caravan and lay down. I thought I would chant for an hour but I was very tired from first playing badminton and then driving for four hours, so I slept after a mere 20 minutes and woke up three hours later, at 4 am. I went to the lake � just remember, I don�t know how to swim, so getting to the lake and filling a bucket for my bath while making sure I didn�t slip into the water was not easy. Nevertheless, I managed. I bathed outside and took another bucket of water back to the caravan, and started my chanting.

The day went well. At night, during my rest period, I felt somebody wearing a hood was looking right at me through the little window of the caravan.

�Who�s there?� I said. Nobody answered.

�Who�s there?� I said again. Still nobody answered.

I flashed a light through the window, but in the pitch darkness outside the flash just glared back at me from the window pane. I heard some noise outside as if somebody was running. I got up quickly and opened the door of the caravan, and in the meantime, whatever this figure was just ran away; I couldn�t catch a glimpse of anything.

Now that I am up, I thought, I might as well do some more chanting. So I chanted the whole night, and did so also for the third night. When I ended my sadhana on Monday morning, something beautiful happened. Before I tell you what happened, let me say that I don�t want you to believe that something supernatural occurred, although I have experienced many such things in my life. This was simply beautiful. I had to do a little yagna . Now for the yagna , I did not have the firewood, nor did I have the permission to light a fire there. Also, I wasn�t carrying any ingredients for the yagna . I just wanted to light a little fire.

Luckily, I had taken some matchboxes with me. I broke off the heads, and the matchsticks became my tiny pieces of firewood. So I did a little yagna outside and when I finished and looked up, there was the most glorious sight of 40 or 50 lotuses by the bank of the lake nearby. They were in full bloom, with pink blossoms and sea-green pads, bathed in gentle sunlight � it was just delightful. I felt that my sadhana was complete. I have no clue why I failed to notice them on the first two days.

I should not use the word sadhana � it was more a mini anushthana but because it was the Gayatri mantra, the heat in my body was so great that I did not know what to do. I lost all my appetite because when there is excessive heat in the body, you tend to lose your appetite. I drove back home, and I didn�t feel hungry that day or the next day. I just wanted to lie down but my mind was active, and my body energetic. I really couldn�t do much.

The Gayatri mantra is one of the reasons I could live in the Himalayas wearing robes as the kind I wear � all cotton. This is actually more clothing than I wore in Badrinath during my sadhana. I was just in my loincloth, and the cold there did not bother me in the slightest. This is because the Gayatri mantra fires up the solar channel in your body.

If you feel excessive heat in your body when you chant the Gayatri mantra, it is important to lie down on your right side for a little while because when you lie down on your right side, your left channel, which is your lunar channel, will be activated. You will start to breathe from your left nostril and when you breathe from your left, you will cool down somewhat.

Next time you are angry or agitated, check if you are breathing from the left or right. In meditation, when you experience restlessness or aggressive thoughts, make sure you are breathing from the left � you will feel a calming sensation within a few minutes. If you are feeling lazy, breathe from the right nostril and this will invigorate you.

Invoking the Gayatri mantra in a structured manner will help you build a reservoir of divine energy. Let me go over that.

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The Specifics of Gayatri Sadhana

How Long Does It Take?

There are many ways to accumulate the energy of the Gayatri mantra in your consciousness. How long it takes for you to complete the sadhana depends on what kind of purushcharana you undertake. At the end of the day, the idea is quite simple: the more you gather, the more you have available for use at a later date. However, not everyone has the time or inclination to undertake a long purushcharana . Irrespective of how little or much you do, the important thing to bear in mind is that the quantity of japa should be the same every day throughout your purushcharana .

Laghu Purushcharana (Mini Invocation)

3�9 days

Mini invocation is done over a minimum period of three days to a maximum of nine. Many people do it for nine days during the Navaratras, for example. When undertaking laghu purushcharana , you are required to do a minimum chanting of 1000 every day. The more the better, as long as you maintain the same quantity every day. Doing it during the Navaratras is particularly auspicious and you can consult panchangam online or ask any Vedic scholar about the dates of the Navaratras that change every year.

Sadharana Purushcharana (Standard Invocation)

40�120 days

This is the ordinary kind of purushcharana. That�s not to say that it doesn�t have an impact � it does. More than the first one and less than the next one. It is called ordinary or standard purushcharana because this is the bare minimum you need to do before you can start accumulating the energy of the Gayatri mantra. In the standard invocation, you chant the mantra a minimum of 100,000 times. Ideally, this should be done over a period of 40 days, which means you could chant approximately 2500 times every day for 40 days. If you are not doing yajna or the other post-japa rituals, then it is recommended to chant 3000 times every day for 40 days. It is also permissible to do this over 60, 90 or 120 days depending on how much time you are able to devote on a daily basis.

I would like to remind you that the vow to do a purushcharana is taken before you begin one. Therefore, you maintain the same quantity every day. If you decide to do a 60-day purushcharana and chant 2000 times on the first day, that consistency then must be maintained for the remaining 59 days. You can�t change your 60-day purushcharana to a 120-day or a 40-day one once you�ve begun it.

Asadharana Purushcharana (Extraordinary Invocation)

18�24 months

Very few people undertake this kind of purushcharana . In fact, over the last three decades, I�ve met only three people who have done this kind. It involves chanting the Gayatri mantra 2,400,000 (24 lacs) times over a period of 18 or 24 months.

The japa is pegged at 24 lacs because the Gayatri mantra has what we call 24 varnas . Those are: tat, sa, vi, tur, va, re, na, yam, bhar, go, de, va, sya, dhi, ma, hi, dhi, yo, yo, na, pra, cho, da and yat. Mantra science dictates that to really invoke the energy of a mantra, you have to chant as many lacs of times as there are varnas in a mantra � not letters, but varnas, which roughly equate to syllables.

Maha Purushcharana (Grand Invocation)

24�32 months

This is the ultimate form of purushcharana and I�ve only known one person who did this 19 times in his life. Shriram Sharma of Shanti Kunj, Haridwar, was said to have done Gayatri Maha Purushcharana multiple times. The story I wrote in the chapter �The Power of Gayatri Mantra� was of a direct disciple of Shriram Sharma.

In Maha Purushcharana , the Gayatri mantra is chanted 32 lacs or 3,200,000 times because when we add Om-bhur-bhuva-svaha to the original Gayatri mantra found in the Rig Veda (3.62.10), the complete mantra has 24 varnas . They are 24 as explained earlier plus a , u , m (for Om ), bhu , bhu , va , sva and ha .

The maximum period allowed to do a Maha Purushcharana is 32 months. There is no relaxation of rules for the longer purushcharana. The same principles of diet, abstinence and conduct apply to all four types. I must remind you here that just reckless or mindless chanting has no place or respect in mantra yoga. Your chanting must be done with devotion and mindfulness. I cannot stress this point enough. When you sit down to chant, do so patiently and mindfully, listening to your own voice, every word, every letter of your mantra. It will get tiring at times, but keep going if you care to go till the end.

The one who does 32 lakhs of japa of the Gayatri mantra is bound to have the grace of Devi in immeasurable, inexplicable ways. New dimensions of consciousness, new ways of thinking and new areas of knowledge and wisdom opens up to anyone who does this purushcharana , and if you do so with devotion, you will also attain what we call vak siddhi . Vak siddhi means when you say something from your heart, it becomes the truth; indeed, everything you say from your heart becomes the truth. That�s how our sages achieved an exalted state in their own lifetimes.

When Can You Start This Sadhana

You can start Gayatri sadhana on any full moon day. You can carry out the routine in the morning or at night. Praying to the Divine Mother in the form of Gayatri in the morning is the Vedic worship while the exact same routine, when undertaken at night, becomes Her tantric method of worship. The main thing is to be consistent. If you start a purushcharana by doing just one session of chanting in the morning, follow that till you complete the purushcharana . If you start your sadhana by chanting only in the evening, stick to that till the end. It is also perfectly fine to split your session into morning and evenings. Once again, if you do that, make sure you follow the same routine till you finish your purushcharana . Please note that at the beginning of every session, you�ve to do purification, nyasa and all the other steps as specified later in this chapter. Of course, you only have to perform the seven steps if you choose the brief invocation over comprehensive invocation. The idea is to train your mind by doing the same thing at precisely the same time for the same amount of minutes or hours every day for a certain length of duration.

Who Can Do This Sadhana

Any person, of any age, religion, ability or background can do this sadhana with or without initiation. Menstruating women can start or continue their sadhana without any reservations whatsoever. Complete abstinence must be practiced throughout the purushcharana . There�s no dosha (issue) in case of wet dreams or any other involuntary release of sexual fluids. Voluntarily though, any form of sexual gratification is forbidden.

Diet

Throughout your purushcharana, you should be on a strict vegetarian diet. Dairy is allowed but no meat, seafood or eggs. No onion or garlic either. Be careful of eating biscuits, cakes, cheeses and supplements that may contain animal-derived ingredients. If your doctor has prescribed any medication, feel free to take it without any of the considerations above.

Lamp

Ideally, the lamp used in this purushcharana should be made of brass. An earthen lamp or a silver lamp can also be used. The wick must be of cotton. It is permissible to use braided cotton thread (like the common sacred red thread, mauli , for example, or any other) to use as a wick. The oil used in the lamp should be either ghee or sesame oil. If you are doing this sadhana in winters in a cold region, I would recommend using sesame oil as ghee solidifies very quickly and it may put out your lamp. Once again, it�s important to be consistent. If you start your sadhana by lighting a ghee lamp, stick to that throughout your purushcharana .

Direction

The aspirant should face east, north or northeast while doing the chanting and the yajna .

Clothing

Any color is okay but the best are red, yellow and white. Ideally, you should wear no more than two pieces of red, yellow or white loose-cloth on your body � one to cover your lower body and the other to cover the upper part. If you are in a very cold place, you can either use a heater in your room or sew your upper cloth with a woolen shawl. Women can wear a saree, blouse, etc.

Beads Bag (Gomukha )

If you use chanting beads, then I recommend using a bead bag called gomukha . Most of you would know how to use the gomukha . It�s got two openings; one is larger than the other. It is designed so when you put the rosary in it, the beads don�t touch the ground or dirty hands, and are kept pure.

You can wear it around your head if you like. Then you chant with the beads inside it, the index finger, however, remains outside the smaller opening of the gomukha .

Seat

The best seat will be a blanket on which you should spread the same colored cloth you cover your body with. Or, if you are wearing regular clothes (and not one of the three colors mentioned in the previous section) while doing purushcharana , you can just put a yellow cloth on your seat. The nature of this sadhana requires you to sit on the floor. If you are unable to do that, you may try sitting in a chair and setting up a table in front of you with lamp, pots, etc. Personally, I have never experimented with that. If you do, please feel free to share the results of your sadhana.

Other than a blanket, you can also take a standard meditation cushion or use any seat made from cotton.

A seat made out of kusha grass is also permissible for this sadhana.

Posture

Try to maintain stillness of your posture while you chant with utmost mindfulness, faith and devotion. Please allow me to remind you that mantra sadhana is not about reckless chanting of a mantra just for the sake of ticking off an item on your list. It is the soulful process of becoming one with your deity so you may elevate yourself spiritually, materially and emotionally.

Things You Will Need for Gayatri Sadhana

A lamp (brass, silver, or earthen)

Ghee or sesame oil and wick for your lamp

Five small water pots, a small spoon and a saucer if you are performing the comprehensive invocation or only one water pot if it�s a brief invocation. The pots can be of silver, copper or brass. This is the standard for every sadhana and details on how to lay out the pots (patra ) can be found in the chapter �Arrangement of Pots (Patrasadana )� in �Detailed Notes�.

Standard ingredients for fire offerings (yajna ) as mentioned in the chapter �How to Make Fire Offerings (Yajna )�.

In addition to those ingredients, you will need firewood. You can use either wood from a sacred fig (Ficus religiosa . Common name: Peepul ), mango (Magnifera indica , Common name: Aam or aamra ) or palasha (Butea monosperma . Common name: Plasha or dhak ). You can also use the wood from deodar (Cedrus deodara . Common name: Devadaru ) or teak (Tectona grandis . Common name: Sagaun or sheesham ).

Chanting beads made from rudraksha

A lot of faith, devotion and discipline

I strongly recommend that after going through this chapter, you make a daily checklist in line with the 36 steps I enumerate below. Also, make a daily list of what all you require; it�s better to procure everything in advance.

The Mantra Sanskrit (Devanagari) Sanskrit (IAST) ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः oṃ bhūrbhuvaḥ svaḥ तत्सवितुर्वरेण्यम tatsaviturvareṇyama भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि। bhargo devasya dhīmahi। धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात॥ dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāta॥

Before You Begin

We must seek permission from the Divine Mother before undertaking Her sadhana. The simplest way to do this is to take a bath and sit at your altar after sunset. Take a bit of water in your right hand and mentally call upon the Divine Mother in the form of Gayatri and seek permission that may She and other forces of nature allow you to complete Her sadhana. Leave the water in the plate next to you.

Next, do 3, 7, 10 or 30 rounds of the Gayatri mantra chanting for mini, standard, extraordinary and grand invocation respectively. Use rudraksha beads. Use the same beads to commence your purushcharana the next day.

One round is 108 times. Thirty rounds will be chanting your mantra 108 � 30 = 3240 times, for example. Personally, I always chant 10,000 times before doing any major purushcharana . Once done, go to sleep in the same place where you chanted the Gayatri mantra. Here�s the mantra again for your reference. Sanskrit (Devanagari) Sanskrit (IAST) ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः oṃ bhūrbhuvaḥ svaḥ तत्सवितुर्वरेण्यम tatsaviturvareṇyama भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि। bhargo devasya dhīmahi। धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात॥ dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāta॥ Translation May we abide in the Supreme Energy that is eternal, transcendental, radiant, perfect, divine. May such divine grace always guide us on the path of righteousness.

How to Perform the Rites of Invocation (Purushcharana )

In this book, I have shared two methods of invocation: Comprehensive and Brief. Comprehensive is for seekers who are able to devote more time to sadhana. I recommend the comprehensive method but someone invoking with the right sentiment will benefit just as much from the brief invocation as well. By right sentiment I mean that while chanting they are mindful, devotional and hopeful.

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Essentials Steps in Gayatri Sadhana

The comprehensive invocation has 36 steps while the brief method has only 7 steps.

To perform so many steps in chanting the mantra might seem a little daunting in the beginning, but don�t worry, first, we�ll cover all the steps, so you know how to do each step, and then we can see which ones we can do without. Some things in many of the steps below may sound like rituals. Well, that�s because they are. As I said earlier, first let me tell you everything, and then you can always cut out what you don�t like. Besides, in case you don�t want to go the immersive way, you can adopt the shorter route of just seven steps described at the end of this chapter.

Please note that the mantras used in this chapter are for your reference only. Their correct Sanskrit transliteration (for better phonetic accuracy) is given in the appendix. The pictures for various mudras too are in the appendix. (The description and meanings given in the appendix have been quoted verbatim from my book The Ancient Science of Mantras ). The purpose of this chapter is to help you get familiar with all the steps but when you decide to do the actual sadhana, it is the information in the appendix you�ll use directly.

The Comprehensive Method

Step One

The first step is bathing. Remember your mother used to tell you when you were growing up, �Take a shower, take a shower�? And you would say, �No, I don�t feel like it today,� and you would not listen (just kidding). I am telling you the exact same thing. I read this book, All I Really Need to Know I Learnt in Kindergarten. This is so true. All the basic human values have already been taught to us by the time we are just five-or-six-years old. You know: share your stuff, say grace, don�t tell lies, go to bed on time and wake up early, and so on.

The first thing is bathing in the morning and it begins by showing two mudras. Fill a bucket of water if you take bath using a bucket or simply display the two mudras below under the shower (if you bathe by stepping into the shower).

Kalasha Mudra

Kalasha means a vessel, a pot, a ghat . This has come from my lineage of siddhas. Form a fist with your left hand and hold it with your right hand (wrap your left hand with your right).

Some people begin their day, not with kalasha mudra but kalesha mudra . Kalesha is the Sanskrit word for mental afflictions. They start their day thinking what is not right in their life. Stay with kalasha .

Form a fist with your left hand and cover it with your right hand. This is the most simple kalasha mudra . On that, we form a matsya mudra , which is called the forming of a fish. This is with the left hand at the bottom and right hand on top. This is the fish � don�t eat it. Now you have filled the bucket with water, performed the kalasha mudra and the matsya mudra .

Matsya Mudra

Matysa means fish. Stretch your left hand, palm facing downwards and thumb pointing out. Put your right hand on top, once again, palm facing downwards and thumb pointing out. Just twiddle your thumbs a bit and the matsya mudra is complete. (Matsya mudra is shown in the appendix).

One of Vishnu�s first incarnations was a matsya . The idea is that by showing these two mudras, we get in touch with our primordial source.

Now chant the following mantra:

Ganga cha yamune caiva godavari sarasvati,

The Story of Kalavati

When I was small, there was a woman who lived at the far end of our street with her four children. Her name was Kalavati, and she was illiterate. Her husband had held a government job, but he died when her eldest daughter was about seven years old. There was a provision in her husband�s department that in case an employee died while still in service, someone from the family would get a job in their place. But with Kalavati being illiterate and children small, none of them could get a job. She took to washing dishes and cleaning people�s homes, which was the only work she could do to feed her family. Kalavati had great faith in Shiva, and there was only one mantra that she chanted all the time: Om Namah Shivaya . This simple mantra was the mantra of her life.

I was quite young, not even four years old, when Kalavati was widowed. It did not even occur to me she might have had a husband at some point in time. I thought she had always been that way, just her with four children, doing dishes in people�s homes.

My mother said to her once, �I cannot allow you to do dishes in my home because you are a very spiritual person, and I cannot live with the burden that you do dishes and clean homes. So I will just pay you something � we�ll get somebody else to do the work.�

Over the years, something remarkable happened to Kalavati. Her face started to shine like the sun. She was the first person whom I saw who had not just a soft glow to her skin, but a radiance so striking, as if it was just flowing from her � and she was somebody who did not even have money to buy soap. Her heels were badly cracked too, because she could not afford slippers � any time somebody gifted her slippers, she would simply give them to one of her daughters or sons. She would say, �My children need slippers more than I do.� So her heels were cracked, but her face glowed mightily.

By the time she turned sixty, not even one wrinkle formed on her skin. There was just her large, glowing face, with her giant forehead framed by matted locks, because she was very poor.

At first, she and her children lived in only one room. With some help, they managed to get another room for two of her children, then one of her sons got married and the other one started riding a little rickshaw. She put a tin roof over them, and that�s where she would live. In that little place, there was a bed and a large picture of Shiva, and she would spend all of her time there.

One day, when my parents were looking for a match for my sister, she came to our home and said to my sister, �Tomorrow, some people are coming to see you.� My mother was there, as was I. I was now 16 years old. We were all surprised, because indeed someone was coming to see if there was a possibility of a marital alliance, but we hadn�t told anybody. Kalavati said, �They will come in a white car, high car. The boy will be wearing a shirt with stripes.� And for some reason, she added, �They will end up staying longer than planned. And you will get married here. And oh,� she said, �the boy is fair-skinned.�

The next day, some people showed up in a white Tata Sierra � a boy with a fair complexion, along with his mother and sister. He was wearing a shirt with stripes. Can you imagine? And he accidentally locked his ignition key in the car, which delayed them. They called somebody to help, but they couldn�t open the door lock. Finally, they broke the window of the car so they could get into it. Everything she said came to pass, word for word, except that my sister never got married there. And the alliance never actually happened.

There was a funny reason for that.

When they had to break the window of the car, the mother of the prospective groom became concerned. She was a widow from a very well-off family, and had been through a good deal of suffering in her life. She thought the episode with the window to be a bad omen. �I am worried,� she said. �If this is what is happening before the wedding, then afterwards, God knows what all we will have to bear.�

When you chant a mantra with devotion and faith, you develop very sharp intuition � but that does not mean everything you say will come true. It can, provided you remain emotionally unattached. Kalavati loved our family, she came on her own volition to make those predictions, and she wanted my sister to get married there.

Herein lies two of your greatest challenges as a sadhak : a) To not say things that are not part of your intuition, and b) To know what isn�t part of your intuition. You must ask yourself, is what I am saying coloured by my emotions? For example, you might say to someone, �Don�t worry, everything is going to work out.� Are you saying this because you care about that person and you don�t want him to go through any trouble, or are you saying this because you are hearing, feeling or perceiving it that way?

When you do mudras and when you do nyasa correctly, the chances of such errors lessen significantly, because you are in Devi bhava � you are in the sentiment of your deity. You are unlikely to just blabber out of a sense of attachment; to say things that you want to happen. Instead, you would say things objectively, like a radiologist reading a report or scan. There comes a discerning wisdom when you chant a mantra correctly.

It will also reinforce your faith. Kalavati�s daughter got married, and was later burned for dowry. She received third-degree burns and the moment Kalavati heard the news, she came running to my mother and said, �Look what has happened.� Kalavati was scared because being unlettered she thought how would she talk to the doctors, which hospital, what ward, how would she get the medicines from the pharmacist and so on. Her daughter was in a different city and Matarani (my mother) told her, �Don�t worry, we will take care of her.� Matarani took some of her own money, and collected some funds from two of her colleagues, Reeta and Veena. With this, Kalavati�s daughter�s treatment was done, and she was saved with God�s grace.

During this extraordinarily painful event, Kalavati never questioned her faith, never faltered. She was very graceful. She just said to my mother, �I cannot see my daughter in this state.� Not once did she say, �Why me, Shiva, why me, Lord? Why my daughter? I have been praying to you all my life and here my daughter is, burnt by her husband. Why? Is this the reward of faith?� This is what a beggar or a trader does � one who is doing bhakti like a business transaction: I have done this for God, now God will be pleased with me, therefore, nothing bad should happen to me. Kalavati was made of different material. She and her faith were unwavering.

Some more time passed. She came to me once, and said, �Very soon, you will go abroad.� In a matter of months, I was in Australia. She also used to consult me, by the way. I am only telling you one half of the story. For astrology and the like, she had many a good conversation with me. She would drop by, and it always gave me great joy to serve her � to feed her, to give her some gift, which she often refused. It doesn�t matter who you are � somehow, when somebody is truly spiritual, sooner or later you experience that person�s goodness.

Kalavati was proof that you chant a mantra to purify yourself, to be more spiritual. It doesn�t matter how much of a believer or non-believer you are; how staunch an atheist you are � sooner or later, faith will take its place in your heart, as if it owns it, which it does.

The first time I came back from Australia in December 2000, I went and met Kalavati. She was living in the same old, run-down place. I said to her, �You shouldn�t be living under this tin roof. Please allow me to build a decent home for you. You can have your own washroom.� There was a little space there, and I said, �We can manage something here. You can even have your own air conditioner.�

�No, no, I don�t want an air conditioner,� she said. �My children would not let me have it. Besides, who is going to pay the electricity bill?�

�At least let me get you a water cooler. I can take care of the electricity bill.�

�No, I don�t want it. I won�t live here.�

�The best I can do, then,� I said, �is to give you the money and you can build whenever you wish.�

�Okay,� she said, �I will let you know.� But a year passed, and she did not take up my offer. I called my mother, and said, �I promised her something, but she wouldn�t take the money at that time, and the room is still not built. I�ve given my word; I�ve made a pledge, and I want to fulfill it. So I am sending you the money � just give it to her: Say, �Put it in the river, I don�t care. But you have to do something with it.��

At my mother�s bidding, Kalavati finally accepted. I went to meet her on my next visit again. And I remember, when I bowed for her blessings, she gave me a hard slap on my back, because she was in her bhava . She would never do that to anybody, for the record. She said. �Sit,� and made me sit. She chanted her mantra and came into her sentiment. Her body started shaking a little, and then she gave me a solid blow on my back with her palm again. At that time, I felt I had been given something special. You know how sometimes you have an experience that only you can comprehend, and is almost impossible to describe? And at that moment, I felt all those years that I�d been doing Shiva�s chant � I used to do many kinds of Shiva sadhanas � I had received the fruit of it all.

Soon afterwards, Kalavati stopped cleaning people�s homes. She ceased working altogether; she would just remain in that one room, chanting all day and all night. That was her life, and with each passing day, she looked younger. I have hardly seen such a glow on anyone�s face, as I have with hers. The radiance seemed to shine from within her skin, and under her matted locks, her face was utterly beautiful � to that, I am a witness.

Without any pain, or suffering in her last days, she slipped quietly into the other world.

This is what mantras can do when you chant them with reverence.

There comes a time when you go beyond the Vedas and all kinds of tapas . Firmly established in your devotional sentiment, you become one with the Divine, says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.¹ Besides, he says, the one who has found a vast lake of fresh water no longer has any need of small springs here and there. Such becomes the state of one who has surrendered to the Divine Will. ²

The glow on Kalavati�s face was not just out of sadhana, it was of bhakti and goodness. She was completely illiterate, and picked the simplest mantra, because that�s the mantra her guru had given her. She would go and see her guru once in four or five years, because she did not have the money or the time to travel; she did not do her guru�s darshan more than five or six times in her entire life. But she never stopped chanting that mantra. Om Namah Shivaya was not what she uttered � it was what she had become. That�s the power of sound, of devotion, faith, of mantras.

To do my job properly, I have shared with you everything that I have done or known about Gayatri sadhana, now it is up to you to take it forward in your own life. Based on your temperament, mindset, circumstances, lifestyle and so on, you can choose what appeals to you. Be patient. As associating with a trained singer or a concert pianist does not make you an expert musician, simply reading my books or getting initiation from me won�t do much at all. At the end of the day, it is your own practice alone that will help you sail across.

I can only do two things, both of which I do sincerely, to the best of my abilities. One, share with you all that I know. Two, pray for you.

I offer this work to you.

¹vedeṣhu yajñeṣhu tapaḥsu chaiva dāneṣhu yat puṇya-phalaṁ pradiṣhṭam, atyeti tat sarvam idaṁ viditvā yogī paraṁ sthānam upaiti chādyam. The Bhagavad Gita, 8.28 . Yogis who know the secret of leaving this world peacefully (Krishna expounds in the earlier verses) go beyond the merit gained from the Vedic rituals, austerities, sacrifices and so on. They merge in the Supreme Consciousness.

² The full verse is yāvān artha udapāne sarvataḥ samplutodake, tāvānsarveṣhu vedeṣhu brāhmaṇasya vijānataḥ. The Bhagavad Gita, 2.46. It also means that a large source of water can serve the same purpose as many small sources of water. Similarly, many small pleasures of the material world are automatically fulfilled for the one who realizes the Supreme Truth.

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APPENDIX

In this section:

Gayatri Sadhana with 36 steps with transliteration and translation for quick reference while you do the sadhana

Arrangement of pots

How to make fire offerings

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Sadhana Steps � The Comprehensive Method

1. Bathe

Chant the following mantra while putting the first mug of water on you (or when you step into the shower, if you are taking a shower): Sanskrit (Devanagari) Sanskrit (IAST) गंगा च यमुने चैव गोदावरी Gaṃgā ca Yamune caiva सरस्वती | Godāvarī Sarasvatī | नर्मदे सिंधु कावेरी जलेस्मिन Narmade Siṃdhu Kāverī संनिधिम कुरु || jalesmina saṃnidhima kuru || Translation I invoke the holy presence of Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu and Kaveri in this water.

2. Put on fresh clothes

3. Enter the sanctum sanctorum or open your altar

Gently tap on the floor with your left heel and say out loud, �Om Hrim Astraya Phat !�

4. Purification

Once inside the puja griha , you begin by purifying yourself and the energies around you. Use your left hand to take a bit of water using the spoon in your vessel and put it in the right one. Chant the following mantra:

Om apavitrah pavitro vā

The Arrangement of Pots (Patrasadana )

�Patra� means a vessel or a receptacle and �asadana� means to lay out something. Patrasadana is the precise process of laying out various pots or vessels used in your puja. Together, they are called pancha-patra � five vessels used for various things and sixth is a saucer-like small plate you use to put aside your offerings. These are usually small pots, each one containing no more than 100 ml of water. In addition to this, a spoon (achamani ) is used to take water from these pots and to put them in the saucer or your hand depending on the ritual you are performing.

The five pots (patras ) are:

1. Water for purification (Achamana )

This vessel contains the water you use for your consumption throughout the puja. When performing achamana , take a bit of water in your right palm using the spoon. Generally, achamana is done for purification and can be different for different sadhanas. For the four sadhanas listed in this book, I�ve clearly written wherever you need to perform achamana . Other than drinking, at the beginning of any puja, a bit of water is taken from this pot and sprinkled in the air to purify the environment and energies around you.

2. Plain water for offering (Arghya )

From this vessel, you offer water to the deity of the mantra and His/Her companion energies. When offering arghya , you take a bit of water from the arghya pot and put it in the small saucer/plate to collect this water. You can use the same spoon to offer water that you used to offer achamana or you can keep a separate spoon for this.

3. Fragrant water for offering (Sugandhita arghya )

As part of the 5, 10 or 16 offerings, fragrant water may be offered to the deity. If any particular sadhana requires a special kind of fragrance, I�ve listed it there. If nothing is specified, you can make the water fragrant by keeping a few petals of a rose in it. Or by mixing it with sandalwood paste. You can also put a drop of any all-natural extract of any fragrant substance like flowers, etc.

4. Water for libations (Tarpana )

Water from this pot is used for offering libations to the deity, other energies and ancestors. There are many ways to do libations depending on the nature of the libation and your sadhana, but the simplest way is to chant the mantra for libation, take a bit of water using the spoon (you can use the same spoon as achamana ) and put it back in the libation pot.

5. Water for washing (Padyam )

Every time an aspirant does achamana (drink water for purification), he�s supposed to wash his hands. This is done using water from this pot, usually using a different spoon and not the same one as for achamana . A bit of water is taken in your right hand and the spoon is put back in the pot. Both hands are then rubbed on your left side using this little water for purification. Water from this pot is also used to offer padyam to the deity while making 10 or 16 offerings. Take a bit of water from this pot using a spoon and put it in the plate next to you.

The sixth is a saucer. It�s a little plate used to collect water. Please see the diagram below to understand the scriptural injunctions on how to lay out these pots in front of you.

Altar/Picture or idol of the deity/Yantra /Lamp

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How to Make Fire Offerings (Yajna )

भूर्भुवःस्वस्तरुस्ता रः सविता प्रपितामहः ।