How does a Mantra ‘work’?

I should like to tell you a story which illustrates the way that sound can effectively change lives. It’s about someone I knew personally, a research scientist, who spent his life studying the physiological effects of the human voice.

This person suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and, at the age of eighteen, was often forced to stay in bed. At this time he was frequently reduced to a pitiful state and the treatments he was given had no real effect.

One afternoon one of his relatives came to see him. She brought her baby girl with her and my researcher friend was fascinated by the little thing: she was the image of emerging life and the joy of being alive, very different from his own poor, weak body.

The scientist wanted to look at the baby and asked for her to be placed beside him. The child began to look calmly around her, then started to fidget a little. She made a few noises, as all children do: aaa, gaa, kaa, maa, buu, mii... He listened, fascinated, then noticed that some sounds involved the abdominal region, others the region inside the ribcage, known as the thorax.

Gradually he became convinced that the child was responding to a precise physiological need, and that this was helping the development of her vital functions, such as breathing, digestion, and so on. That very evening he tried a few exercises using the sounds he had learned from the baby.

He continued for the next few days, and then a little longer, and he gradually noticed something awakening in his weakened body. Encouraged by these early results, he developed this technique, continually enriching it with new experiments.

This is how he wrote about what he was doing.

My method, which consists of breathing while saying the vowel sounds, has notable effects. In particular it produces reactions in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and acts not only on the circulation of the blood, but also on the functioning of the endocrine glands and vital organs.

In addition, the vibrations give rise to emotions. Our language includes five vowels: a, e, i, o, u (‘y’ being simply a transcription of ‘i’). My method involves imagining the vowel and the sound that goes with it, trying to perceive the emotion it awakens in us.

Each vowel has its own specific field of action: my observations suggest that ‘I’ acts on the larynx, nose and head; ‘E’ on the neck, vocal chords and thyroid; ‘A’ acts on the area above the thorax; ‘O’ on the middle section of the thorax; ‘U’ on the stomach, liver, lower abdomen and genital organs. I practiced my method for thirty years and I can state that it has enabled me to recover my health and also to cure other people. Yet it is as simple to practice as breathing or humming.

In reality what this man discovered, on a smaller scale, was the way that the magic of the Mantra works. His desire to get better, his faith and his experiments gradually led him to create his own ‘Life Mantra’, which had the specific effect of promoting his return to health.

So you can imagine the miracles that can be worked by the Sacred Mantras of the Emerald Table, which were developed by true Initiates capable of controlling the occult forces at work in the universe...

These various examples are intended to help you understand something important: when you recite or chant the Sacred Mantras, you must allow the Sound to touch you, as if your entire body could absorb it.

Take your cue from young children as they discover and explore their own babbling in a natural, spontaneous, playful and innocent way.

As a preliminary exercise, I recommend that you try this for yourself; experiment with the different ways that the vowels vibrate.

To do this, place one hand flat on the centre of your chest, then make the sound ‘aaaaa…’. You can change the vibration as you choose, making it louder or softer, longer or shorter; don’t be afraid to try things out, to play with the sound coming from your mouth, changing the tone, so that you can feel how it ‘resonates’ within you.

Then try experimenting with the vibration made by ‘I’; place one hand flat on the top of your skull and make the sound ‘iiiii…’  You can also hold your nose and pinch it very slightly; if you do this you will feel the sound resonating in the hollow of your palate.

Keep going by experimenting with the other vowels in a similar way; put your hand lightly on your throat for the vowel ‘E’, on your stomach or lower abdomen for the sound ‘uuuuu…’, and so on.

I advise you to start by performing this simple little exercise several times a day, spending two or three minutes on each vowel.

By doing this not only will you gradually familiarise yourself with the practice of saying the Mantra (the ultimate aim being to recite the Mantras of the Emerald Table as I shall reveal them to you), but your body’s cells and organs will benefit from a real ‘internal massage’, which is very beneficial for both your health and your overall energy levels.

Above all, make an effort to feel the effects of your chanting, rather than trying to analyse them. In reality it is pointless to seek to remain rational or, worse still, to try to understand in an intellectual, logical way what a Mantra might mean. On the contrary, a Mantra should be approached through what is felt.

There is no point trying to put up any kind of resistance (mental, physical, psychological…) to it; on the contrary you should allow the sound waves to pass through you, speaking to the deepest part of your being, where the spirit is in perfect harmony with the universal principle.

It is in the nature of Sound to slip into the deepest part of your soul. For sound communicates directly with the spirit, whose expression it is. As a result, the Mantra allows us to return to our own centre, the point of spiritual purity where all forms of magical creation become possible.

Indeed the links between spirit and sound have been the subject of in-depth studies by the Masters since the earliest times (the civilisations of Atlantis, Mesopotamia, India, Egypt…). According to esoteric tradition the Rishis – or ancient sages – devoted themselves entirely to the search for the Ultimate reality or Universal Principle, in other words for that reality which lies beyond the limited perceptions of our five senses (hearing, sight, smell, etc.).

In the course of their long meditations, these seers of ancient times heard sounds that belonged to a transcendent state of consciousness and were thus produced by very high levels of energy vibrations.

These sounds were the original Mantras: divine sounds which do not stem from the human mind. They have a specific nature and were called Bija, meaning "seeds". They represent the essential energy of beings belonging to more subtle levels, which the different traditions have called angels, gods or demons.

The ancient sages were familiar with the secret powers of sounds. So they created Mantras, consisting of Bija (or sound-seeds) and syllables or words from the devanagari alphabet (a way of writing Sanskrit, which is a very old oriental language), in which each syllable has a mystical value.