Q: You talk with many people who come fresh to Ananda. What’s your impression of how the music affects them?
Asha: To answer your question I’ll go back a bit in time. In the late 1970s Swami Kriyananda asked me to go on the road and give talks about our teachings. So I began driving primarily to the Northwest to give talks at our centers in Portland and Seattle, and I would never go without at least one of our singers, because I knew that it would be impossible for people to grasp Ananda without listening to our music.
I traveled with one or the other of two very experienced singers who sang and played the music beautifully. I would joke with them, “I’ll talk for ninety minutes and I’ll be lucky if I can bring people to the same point you can bring them with a three-minute song.”
Words need to be interpreted by the mind, but music reaches us directly. When people hear the music, they can quickly sort out for themselves whether this path is for them. When I gave talks, I knew that if they could feel what Ananda is, they would be able to hear what I had to say, because they would have had a very direct experience of Ananda.
The music expresses our vibration very precisely – it’s very specific to our path. People occasionally have issues with this path when they first hear about it – either the ideas are unfamiliar, or they resist religious organizations, or they question Swamiji’s authority, and so on. But they nearly always love the music. And that’s why Swami said, “If you want to know me, listen to my music.” The music is his way of helping people cut through their mental doubts – “Who is Swami?” “Who is Master?” “Who’s really in charge here?” “I don’t like authority.” And so on.
If you like the music, you’ve met the man. And if you like the music, you’ve met the ray of God’s light that he represents.
Q: Swamiji has said that consciousness is feeling – it is not the intellect. Do you believe the music may be more central to his expression of Master’s ray than his books?
Asha: It is. We are made of Aum, and music is a direct expression of Aum. The ideas are the wisdom aspect of God, and heaven knows, we do need to open ourselves to God through all dimensions of our being, including the mind. Here in America at this time when there are so many crazy ideas floating around, finding true ideas is a tremendous blessing. Nevertheless, he doesn’t say “If you want to know me, read my books.” And again, it’s because the music gives us a direct transfer of consciousness. Even if you only spoke German, I could sing these songs in English and you’d have a good chance of knowing what I was singing about.
Q: Swamiji has remarked that the melodies of certain popular songs have a lovely feeling – he’s mentioned “Moon River,” for example. But much modern music seems cold-hearted, whereas there’s a quality in Ananda’s music that feels deeply true and of the heart and soul.
Asha: It’s very sincere. Swami made the statement that he’s never written a note that wasn’t utterly sincere. He’s never written for effect, and he’s never written from a purely mental concept. Every note is a sincere expression of his consciousness, of his feeling.
Q: If the music is an expression of Paramhansa Yogananda’s ray, does that mean it would be helpful for people who want to get in tune with that ray to become involved with the music by singing it?
Asha: There is no substitute! Swamiji has commented a number of times that he wants everyone who has dedicated his or her life to finding God through the ray of Ananda to sing the music. There’s no “must,” and no requirement, much less coercion, but it’s a very strong invitation to do something that will powerfully help them attune their consciousness to a divinely given ray.
You can listen to it, but it’s a very different experience when you’re singing it, because then you’re using your voice and the tones are running through your body. Really, it’s a form of “sound healing.”
At one point Ananda got involved with a woman who was an innovative sound healer. She would read “sound auras” the way other healers read auras of light, and then she would add the “missing” tones by using her voice. She discovered her talent when her daughter was severely injured. They were a long way from the nearest hospital, and she realized that if she toned in a certain way, her daughter stopped bleeding. And so she was able to “tone her” all the way to the hospital and keep her from bleeding to death.
Quite a few people at Ananda became interested in her work, and it was lots of fun, but in the end it went nowhere, because it was a difficult skill to transfer to others. Also, after we’d been involved with this system for some months, she casually remarked, “Oh, you don’t need this because you have your music.” She said, “Your music does the same thing I’m trying to do.”
When we sing the music, it heals us. It fixes our sound aura, and when your sound aura is fixed, it helps heal you from within, physically and emotionally and spiritually.
Q: Not long after I joined the choir, I asked Chaitanya, “How are you able to sing the high notes so purely?” He said, “Singing this music changes your voice.” When I work through a song, it seems to etch new grooves in my brain, so that the song becomes easier to sing. I’m sure it “etches grooves” in my consciousness as well, so I’m vibrating with the blessing of that particular song. Dambara told me that whenever he’s facing some difficult issue in his life, or if he needs the answer to some tough question, a phrase from one of the songs will often come to mind and help him know what to do.
Asha: In the 1970s, Swami was the only one performing the music, but then he stopped singing so that others could step up and develop a performing group.
He more or less had to insist that we sing his music. At the time, people were interested in lots of other kinds of music, and his insistence was controversial in the community. People were saying “Why do we have to sing only his music? There’s lots of other good music.”
I remember him delicately saying, “Lots of people sing that music, and no one else sings this music, so this is something we can specialize in.” He had to try hard to get people to accept that the music was a central focus of our spiritual lives and our service to the world.
I remember how he would interrupt the singers during Sunday service. If they were singing badly, he would stop them and correct them. I watched this happening, and I realized that he was telling the singers that it isn’t enough to sing halfheartedly, because you need to concentrate and do it right. He felt obligated to help them perform the music right because he had heard it that way. He hadn’t created it; he had heard it, and there was a specific way it needed to be sung.
Mukti Deranja is a talented pianist who lives at Ananda Village. When she was learning Swami’s sonata, he sat down with her at the piano while she played it. He went over it phrase by phrase with her, telling her, “No, it needs to be a little bit more like this…”
He told her, “Forgive me, I don’t mean to be so picky, but I heard this, and this is what it sounds like.” He said, “It wasn’t possible to include these nuances in the score.” But he had a crystal-clear memory, note by note, of what it was meant to sound like, and he felt a sense of divine obligation to play it that way, because it isn’t his music, and any slight change will alter the vibration.
Lakshman told me recently that someone had asked Swamiji what his greatest accomplishment was, and he said, “Love is a Magician.”
Q: “Love is all I know, sun rays on the snow…”
Asha: Yes. After he wrote “I Live Without Fear,” he called me and sang it over the phone, and he said, “If I had never done anything, or never do anything else in my life, this song will be enough.”
I think the music is ahead of its time. The vibration of the music is too refined for this age. It will probably be a long while before it captures the public imagination. But music is so ugly now that eventually there will be a reaction, and people will want something better. Another thing that is lovely about the music is that he wrote it so that anybody can sing it.
Q: Almost none of his songs are hard to sing. They can be a bit tricky to learn, but after you’ve practiced for a while they pose few technical difficulties. A bare handful of songs come to mind that are a bit trickier, because the parts are subtle – I’m thinking of the tenor parts of “Memories” and “Where Has My Love Gone?” But those are pieces for small ensembles, while the choir pieces are almost all easier.
Asha: He wrote it on purpose that way, because he wanted to create music that everyone could sing. He remarked that a great deal of music is written so that people can proudly say “Hah! – I can sing that!” But this music is the opposite; anybody can sing it if they have basic skills.
Q: What’s your advice for somebody who wants to join the choir and start singing this music fresh and new?
Asha: I think they should keep in mind that it isn’t about performance. It’s a sadhana – a spiritual practice, and the most important thing about sadhana is that we enjoy it – and to pay attention to the details, pay attention to the meaning – really hear and be conscious of what you’re singing.
As a “word person” I find an extraordinary thing about the music is the power of the words, and the unity of the words and sound. I would advise new people to be deeply conscious, all the time, of what you’re saying.
During an Easter retreat years ago, I gave a class on the Oratorio, and since then I’ve given it every year. Somebody transcribed that first class and sent it to Swamiji. In my talk, I had said that Swami always writes the melody first, but when he read the transcript he told me that it’s almost always true, with the sole exception of the recitatives for the Oratorio, where he had to write the words first, because he had a story to tell, the story of Christ’s life. Otherwise, the melodies come first.
When he was writing the Oratorio, David and I went on a lecture tour to the Northwest. We were living in what is now the guest house at Crystal Hermitage, and just before we left the builders began remodeling Swami’s apartment in the hermitage. And when he came back from wherever he’d been, probably Italy and the Holy Land, his house was a mess.
We had moved into our house just a couple of weeks before, but someone said to Swamiji, “Oh, well, you can live at Asha and David’s, and they can move over here” – into this cave of a construction site, and I really didn’t want to do it. It was one of those times where I just didn’t want to. And he felt it. He kept saying, “No, I can’t possibly do that.” I was silent for a day, and when I had finally mastered myself I said, “Of course he can have this house.” So I went over and said, “You should move into our house.”
“No, no, no.”
“You should move into our house!”
“No, no.”
“Sir – move into our house!”
He knew exactly what I was doing. And then he finally said, “Okay.”
This is all back story. While we were away in the Northwest, not only were they doing the construction work, but a pipe burst and flooded the whole downstairs, and by the time we returned it was bare floorboards, because the rug was ruined and all the furniture was stacked in a corner. There was just a tiny livable space with a throw rug, and it was the dead of winter, and the stove didn’t work.
Anyway, we were living there, and he was staying in the guest house, working day and night on the Oratorio. And then one night at about one in the morning he called and asked me to come over. So I went over, and he was writing “You Remain Our Friend.” He showed me the words, and he said, “What do you think?”
The words were okay, but I could see that he was strained, and you have to be delicate when somebody is giving their total energy to doing creative work. You have to be honest but supportive, and it’s a delicate line. So I said, “Well, you know, sir, it’s all right. Not every song in the Oratorio will be your best song.” He said, “That’s what I wanted to know.” And by morning he had it worked out.
His commitment to completing the Oratorio was amazing. He never really stopped. Devi remarked that Swamiji was so immersed in the music that when he would look at people, you had the feeling that he was trying to figure out if they were a B-flat or an F-sharp. It was as if he couldn’t think in words, because he could only feel the music. He nearly died – he got congestive heart failure, and his body was retaining fluids. But he said, “Satan’s trying to stop me.” And he said, “If I have to, I’ll die trying to write this, but I won’t stop. Whenever I try to do anything important, Satan tries to stop me.”
Q: For ten years in the 1980s and early 1990s, I did medical transcription for Dr. Peter Van Houten at Ananda Village, and I was flabbergasted by Swami’s medical chart. At the time, it was thirteen pages of serious ailments, and I’m sure it’s much longer now.
Asha: Of his thousands of patients, Peter says that Swami’s case is far more complicated than anyone else’s. And Swamiji’s responses were seldom what you would expect from most people. You can often measure the seriousness of a person’s symptoms by their emotional responses, but with Swamiji, Peter couldn’t tell. He gave the example of when he was examining Swamiji’s heart, and Swami was saying, “No, listen carefully – oh, there it is – see how my heart speeds up to 180 and calms down again? Did you hear that, Peter?” [Laughs] Nobody can just say that when their heart is in fibrillation – they react to it.
Q: They’re upset.
Asha: Yes. Peter said that with Swamiji he had to be more like a veterinarian, because a horse can’t tell you what it’s feeling, and Swamiji didn’t respond from personal emotion.
Swamiji says the reason Ananda is so harmonious is because of the music, and the reason Ananda is unified around the world is because of the music. The reason the culture of Ananda is able to transplant so easily to other countries, other languages, and other cultures is because of the music.
Because we sing the same music, we’re on the same wavelength. If we didn’t have the music, the culture wouldn’t be as strong, and aberrations would set in. It’s astonishing to see how, as Ananda has expanded from city to city and country to country, people’s spirit has been the same. And Swami said that it’s because of the music.
The success of our colony in Palo Alto has been due to the music. That’s always been very clear to me. I don’t think we could have accomplished a fraction of what we have, without the music, especially in this area which is so mental. The music has been able to cut right through that. It has brought everybody into a sense of unity.
I didn’t give Sunday service yesterday, so I sat in the congregation. I like to sit in the back and feel what the service is like when I’m not giving it. And it was very interesting to me to feel how sweet the music was, and how it was filled with the power of the inspiration that Swamiji had received. Here in the middle of Silicon Valley, you have this sweet innocence, and I know that it touches people and changes them.