Kirtan is both an art and a science. It is
sung to evoke a feeling that is uplifting and
pure. It is not so much the chanting of
the name that is important as the awakening
of the bhava, the feeling or emotion that
is associated with it.
- Swami Niranjan
Ananda Saraswati
Love is beyond our ordinary
range of emotions. The ego has many
feelings associated with it: anger, desire, attraction, pride, resentment, but
primarily self-loathing. Deep inside of
us we all feel a longing for love, for connection and acceptance. Love is not just a personal feeling; instead
it is our connection with the universe.
The mystic poet Rumi once wrote, “Love is the glue which holds
everything together and it is the everything as well.” When we are able to truly open to love, we go
beyond ourselves and our personal limitations.
As the Bhagavad Gita states, “This supreme Lord who pervades all of
existence, the true Self of all creatures, may be realized through undivided
love.”
Love alone is real. However, our egos have the actual free will
to accept or deny that reality. The
problem is that our patterns of resistance become ingrained as samskaras. These are unconscious patterns of thought and
feeling that dominate our consciousness and which have been accumulated over
lifetimes. To get beyond these we need
help, we need a method, grace, guidance as well as willingness and
commitment. Ego-clinging is worse than
drug, alcohol or tobacco addiction and actually underlies all of them. We tend to use these substances, as well as
habits like sex or gambling, as attempts to relieve the suffering of our
splintered ego selves; as substitutes for love.
The ego always goes for a
counterfeit: a substance, a “relationship,” career, or something. It is a way of disguising our self-loathing;
putting a pretty face over it and calling it “love.” As Marianne Williamson wrote in “A Return to
Love:” “Emotional energy has got to go somewhere, and self-loathing is a
powerful emotion. Turned inward, it
becomes our personal hells: addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression,
violent relationships, illness.
Projected outward, it becomes our collective hells: violence, war,
crime, oppression. But it is all the
same thing: hell has many mansions too.”
The portal to love is not so
difficult though. It is just our
convoluted defenses that make it seem so.
A powerful way to go beyond our ego defenses and open to love comes from
the yoga tradition in the form of kirtan.
Kirtan is the devotional singing of mantras: the language of the soul
which is incomprehensible to the ego-intellect.
Music itself is a language which transcends intellect and transports us
into deeper emotional realms. Mantras
are sounds which, more than representing some rational meaning, are meant to
open deeper energies and higher consciousness.
Kirtan is a means of transcending the ego and opening to the Self, who
is love pure and simply. Mantra along
with melody and rhythm evokes bhava, or higher emotion. You don’t have to begin with a specific
feeling but simply allow yourself to enter into the experience.
Prem, love, and bhakti,
devotion, are certainly not things that we can fabricate through a
technique. Our true feelings emerge
spontaneously. If you have ever tried to
love someone or something you know that it is impossible to make yourself do
so. Instead there is a reservoir of
unconditional love and joy at the core of our beings. It is our Self. Ultimately, as St. Francis of Assisi put it, “What
we are looking for is what is looking.”
Through Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, we are reconnected with that
greater being who lives in and through us.
To quote Rumi again, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to
seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Currently kirtan is becoming
popular in our culture. There are a
number of wonderful professional grade chanters out there today. Much of the music is westernized and departs
from the traditional kirtan of India.
This is not necessarily bad as it helps us to participate more
easily. The important point though is to
join in and give yourself over to the music, mantra and the divine
bhava of kirtan!
