40-Day Global Sadhana: Japji (Day 1)

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The current 40-Day Global Sadhana began yesterday. I, however, began it today.

The Japji is the first Bani of the Sikh sacred book the Sri Guru Granth Sahib. It's also A Big Deal in Kundalini Yoga circles, even for those practitioners who are not Sikhs.

It basically lays out the concept of the genderless Divine as indwelling, not separate from the

Comments

[jaime_sama]

I don't know about your tradition, but mine appears to have an inner tension about pronouncing mantras correctly. On one hand, we are told that it is important to Get it Right otherwise you won't get the vibrations etc. On the other hand, I've come across this fable from two different sources so far:

Two students at the local ashram had heard stories about a holy man who lived out on an island in the middle of a lake. He was said to have chanted the same mantra every day for his whole life. Finally they decided to go out and pay him a visit. They rowed out to the island and the holy man greeted them with pleasure. They asked about his mantra. When he chanted it for them, they looked at one another in dismay. Finally one of the students spoke up. "I'm sorry, but we learned that mantra from our guru and we have to tell you that you are pronouncing it wrong. You've been saying it wrong for your whole life and wasted all those years!" The holy man was disappointed to hear this, and anxiously asked them to teach him the correct way to chant it. After they demonstrated for him, the two students got back in their boat and started rowing home. Halfway across, they heard a shout and saw the holy man running after them on top of the surface of the water. They stopped rowing and stared in shock as he came up to the boat to say "Could you repeat the correct mantra again? I'm not sure I got it." One of the students managed to say the mantra, and the other one added "... but I don't think you need to worry about it!" So the holy man walked home, on top of the water.

Moral: It's all about intention. :)

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HA!

I think it's important to strive to get things right without freaking out about the fact that humans need to learn, which involves practice, which inevitably involves mistakes.

That's a Big Lesson for me, so it's weird that it's working out OK for me - I had a slight wobble where I wandered around in my head freaking that I couldn't possibly do it, and then I just decided that giving it a try and approaching it respectfully was the only way to start from where I am.

Not bothering to listen to recordings or ask people or practice AT ALL in these days of online audio-visual communication would strike me as symptomatic of not wanting to learn. Starting from where you are and setting aside beating yourself up for being in process seems quite sane (and may I point out that I am not beating myself up for not being Perfect?? Brownie points to me!).

Worrying about pronouncing it "perfectly", though, begs the question of whose pronunciation you consider "correct"? A friend of my parents' is German and learned "proper" (read: Oxbridge) English. Then she came to university in Manchester - and she could not understand a word that was being said. When I first went to America, I spent months learning to slow down and modify my accent so people could understand me (how many times was I asked if I was Irish??). Now, to my mind, I speak English properly, whether I'm speaking standard English or a slangy version with local dialect thrown in. There's good evidence that my vowels are closer to the early English vowels than those of my southern English compatriots. Where I live, my accent is towards the posher end of the spectrum; elsewhere, people think I've a very broad north-western English accent. You and I speak very differently, yet we communicate and understand each other.

Whose English is correct? What constitutes "proper" pronunciation? Issues of class and region arise. I'd not like to make assumptions about whether there are class and regional differences in Punjabi speech, never mind the Punjabi speech of several centuries ago, or whether we know for absolute sure and certain that our understanding of the pronunciation of Sanskrit isn't slightly off. Who knows if there has or hasn't been a sort of Chinese Whispers [telephone] effect over the centuries?

So it strikes me that striving to pronounce mantras as effectively as possible is a good thing, whilst getting hung up on it and assuming that the Gods, the Earth, the Cosmos are not big enough to cope with some level of variation can get a bit petty. As you say, intention does have a marked effect.