Of the many practices with sound, only a small number are shown here. The key to mantra is in intention. Let your mind be pure, your heart in tune with the sounds of love. Let this carry you into your words or sounds until you become that which they re-present. Fall into it, enlarge into it, feel.
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"A conventially-minded dervish, from an austerely pious
school, was walking one day along a river bank. He was absorbed in concentration upon moralistic and scholastic problems, for this was the form which Sufi teaching had taken in the community to which he belonged. He equated emotional religion with the search for ultimate Truth.
Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a loud shout: someone was repeating the dervish call. 'There is no point in that' he said to himself, 'because the man is mispronouncing the syllables. Instead of intoning YA HU, he is saying U YA HU'. Then he realized that he had a duty, as a more careful student, to correct this unfortunate person, who might have had no opportunity of being rightly guided, and was therefore probably only doing his best to attune himself with the idea behind the sounds. So he hired a boat and made his way to the island in midstream from which the sound appeared to come. Sitting in a reed hut he found a man, dressed in a dervish robe, moving in time to his own repetition of the initiatory phrase. "My friend', said the first dervish, 'you are mispronouncing the phrase. It is incumbent upon me to tell you this, because there is merit for him who gives and him who takes advice. This is the way in which you speak it.' And he told him. 'Thank you,' Said the other dervish humbly. The first dervish entered his boat again, full of satisfaction at having done a good deed. After all, it was said that a man who could repeat the sacred formula correctly could even walk upon the waves: something that he had never seen, but always hoped - for some reason - to be able to achieve. Now he could hear nothing from the reed hut, but he was sure that his lesson had been well taken. Then he heard a faltering U YA as the second dervish started to repeat the phrase in his old way.
While the first dervish was thinking about this, reflecting upon the perversity of humanity and its persistence in error, he suddenly saw a strange sight. From the island the other dervish was coming towards him, walking on the surface of the water. Amazed, he stopped rowing. The second dervish walked up to him and said: 'Brother, I am sorry to trouble you, but I have to come out to ask you again the standard method of making the repetition you were telling me, because I find it difficult to remember it." - Sufi story (Shah)
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| The technique of the Mantram then consists in following the overtones of the sound beyond the limits of the range of the ear, into the supersonic range picked up by those areas of consciousness usually referred to as the unconscious. One continues to listen, but not with the ear. Thus consciousness is induced to extend beyond its span, shifting its
threshold with the unconscious.
The classical techniques require one to repeat the prescribed mantram a given number of times: 21, 33, 101, 1001, etc.; but it is better to interrupt the sequence if one is not entirely satisfied with the sound produced. There is no point in repeating the same mistake or perpetuating the same imperfection over and over again. Do not content yourself with the sound produced. In fact, one is like the indian musician who, in guise of tuning his instrument, is actually tuning himself to the right pitch. An indian musician may take hours to tune his vina, but actually he is tuning the soul. You say the Bound, and 'Oh, no, that's not it', so you do it again and again and again, and you gradually get your soul into a condition which enables you to produce the desired sound. One feels things in one's self that one doesn't like in the sound that one produces: it's too personal or it's too harsh or there's too much ego in it or it's too inharmonious or there's something in it you don't like: All those things which you suffer from in your sense of beauty, which cause despair in the minds and hearts of men.
After practicing the wazifas (mantras) listen to the harmonics in the atmosphere. Climb the ladder of the harmonics. Become yourself: pure vibration beyond space. You hear in each vibration the harmonics of that vibration, and the harmonics of the harmonics of that vibration. Float on the sea of vibrations. You are in absolute inner sound." -Vilayat Khan
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