The Random Access Wellness Generator 007: Mantra

It’s the late, late show, July 4th, 1994. Allen Ginsberg enters, stage right, to alight on a cushion before a harmonium. Chaos reigns around him. Sound system issues have been resolved too late to prevent Merry Prankster Ken Kesey’s anti-racist street theater from coming off as horribly racist. People are shouting at the stage and walking out. After this performance, Kesey will vow never to return to Boulder, Colorado. The promised dance party begins, music soothing the savage beast of outrage. Allen is upright on the cushion, eyes closed behind his glasses. He is an island of calm in the storm. No poetry escapes his lips, however. Accompanying himself on the squeezebox, he repeats one syllable over and over: AH.

Sound can shape and organize matter; just ask the researchers at Stanford using it to change the structure of heart tissue. Ancient traditions agree. “AH” is the primordial sound of the universe out of which all other sounds and all forms appear, so say the Vedas. The Book of Genesis describes creation as beginning with “the Word.” Musical tones can animate a liquid or fine powder into shapes immediately recognizable as biological, a science called “cymatics.” This physical effect is astounding to see in real time, but the cool factor masks exciting research potentials in other fields. Is sound really the secret of life?

Not being a scientist, I can only answer that question intuitively. (My musician-answer is “Duh!”) We’ll come back to the science of sound another time. Mantra is our topic today: the practice of chanting or intoning a syllable or syllables repeatedly, usually with an accompanying visualization. I feel certain that Mr. Ginsberg was visualizing the Tibetan seed syllable AH at his heart while chanting on stage that night in Boulder.

I, too, have received an AH practice. As you repeat the mantra, you imagine all things and people in the world absorbing into the syllable at your heart. All transforms into light and radiates back out, only to return to be reabsorbed, over and over. You don’t even have to make the sound out loud to do this. I like to do the silent version while taking public transportation.

Mantra teachings are vast and profound. There are mantras consisting of hundreds of syllables and visualizations as complex as a schematic of a spaceship. All cultures practice some form of chanting. Over the millennia it has become a highly refined technology of the nervous system. When science does understand it, I believe we will understand something fundamental about our very existence. I’m not going to try to unpack all of that today, though. I’m just… AH. What more can be said?