The power of Japa

The holiday season was approaching when Dulal told us that Guru would be going to Puerto Rico for Christmas and he would spend a whole month there. Thursday meditation at the Aum Centre would continue as usual, led by Dulal. Following a lifetime devoid of even a smidgen of spirituality, I still was not quite sure why I was attending these meditations, so I decided to meditate at home while Guru was away.

Guru had a monthly publication called Aum Magazine. In one issue1 he gave a very interesting programme for doing japa which he said could significantly improve the quality of our meditation. This involved chanting Aum five hundred times the first day, six hundred times the second day, and so on up to twelve hundred times, then starting down, decreasing by one hundred each day until you arrive back at five hundred.

Please continue this exercise, week by week, just for a month. Whether you want to change your name or not, the world will change your name. It will give you a new name. It will call you by the name Purity. Your inner ear will make you hear it. It will surpass your fondest imagination.

Sri Chinmoy

This was a two-week sequence, so I would be able to go through the whole sequence twice before Guru returned. I started this chanting programme on my birthday and was eager to see if it would really improve my meditation. I used japa beads and kept count of the rounds with ten marbles, transferred one at a time from one little dish to another at the end of each time around the string of beads. At the two-week halfway point I had gone all the way up and all the way down without noticing any change, but I was determined to continue until Guru returned and give it the full opportunity to work.

I finally got a call from Dulal saying that Guru was back. I climbed the four flights of stairs and approached the half-open door to the Aum Centre as usual, but when I tried to enter, I was stopped by a powerful surge of energy pouring out, so strong that I could barely push my way through the doorway. As soon as I sat down, a wave of meditation enveloped me. I didn’t have to do a thing. Now I knew why I was still coming, and that the thousands of Aums that I had chanted had done their job unbelievably well.

As a matter of fact, the results were so spectacular that I decided I would continue repeating the Aum pattern until my NEXT birthday, 11 months away. I can hardly believe that I had enough determination to do it, but I did so, for a total of 13 months.

Very worthwhile. Try this faithfully, for one month. I am sure that you will be pleased with the results!

In New York, some of my disciples have done this exercise and are still doing it. They have achieved, I must say, considerable purification of their nature and of their emotional problems.

Sri Chinmoy
Referring to this exercise

• 1. The role of purity in the spiritual life, a talk given by Sri Chinmoy on 18 June 1966. It appears in AUM Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 7,8