
Q: How did you become involved with Swami Kriyananda’s music, perhaps going back to before you came to Ananda?
Raghu: I started listening to music on an AM transistor radio in the 1960s. I was nine or ten and I would come home for lunch and listen to the AM station in Buffalo, New York. Sometimes I would sing along, but mostly I listened. I was quick to catch the melody line and it would stay in my consciousness, but what I didn’t understand was that I was tuning into the song and the consciousness that it expressed.
My older brother and sister were in college, and they would bring home records by the latest soul groups, so I started to expand my horizons from AM to FM, and I did the same thing with those songs – I would listen to them and sing the melodies and get the songs into my consciousness, and for a long time I listened to Chicago rhythm and blues, soul bands, and singers like Wilson Pickett.
I would enjoy the music for a time, but then I’d be ready for something else and I would move on, because I was always looking to find what else there was in the music world.
My brother returned from the West Coast with a stack of San Francisco music, and it opened another door. Listening to Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane showed me that, okay, this is good music, it’s just different.
In college another avenue opened for mewhich was Appalachian folk music, and from there I went to country music and then country-western.
When I returned to Buffalo after college, I would go hear the latest bands in the nightclubs. I had gone from Appalachian music to country, to jazz – Coltrane, Charley Parker, Thelonious Monk – and then Jazz Fusion with electric groups like Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin.
In college I would spend the evenings with friends in a basement where we had wall-to-wall record albums, hundreds, and the latest quadraphonic sound system. But there eventually came a time when I began to pull away because the music wasn’t fulfilling me anymore. It kept me questing and searching, which was fine, but I realized that I was looking for a sound that I just wasn’t finding. Everything I listened to was good and the musicians were talented, but it left me hanging, because there was nothing that I could lock onto.
At some point in the early 1970s I read Autobiography of a Yogi. I had been searching for a way to balance my life, and I didn’t recognize Yogananda’s path as a new personal vocation, but reading the AY changed my inner direction. I began to pull away from nights of listening to the latest bands, and I started to become quieter, and in becoming quieter I more or less gave up listening to music on the radio.
Around 1976 I discovered that Swami Kriyananda had a community in northern California, and that it was called Ananda. I knew that it was a cooperative village, but for some reason I didn’t realize that it was an actual piece of land. I read Yoga Postures for Higher Awareness and Your Sun Sign as a Spiritual Guide, and then Cooperative Communities – How to Start Them, and Why, and that’s when I realized that there was a community of about a hundred people near Nevada City, California.
I made a commitment to move to Ananda Village, but I first spent a year cleaning up the loose ends in my life, and I began practicing hatha yoga. I had met a teacher from India, and I would drive across the bridge to Canada and do yoga postures with him.
On my way home from a yoga session, I stopped in Buffalo to visit a friend, and he said, “Have you heard Yogananda’s voice?” I said no, and he pulled out an album of chants and prayers and put on the first cut, “Prayer at Dawn.” And when I heard his voice, I thought, “That is what I’m looking for.”
It was so expansive and far-reaching. Hearing his voice and listening to the harmonium lifted my consciousness, and I thought, “This is the sound I’m looking for. This is the sound that I have the potential to resonate with.”
I fell in love with it, and I gave up all the other music. I bought the album and listened to it over and over, and a year later I was on the bus to Ananda.
I joined the apprentice program, and occasionally one of the Village residents would come over to lead a kirtan. The one who came over most often was Lakshmi, and the chanting was a whole new sound that I wasn’t used to. I was familiar with Yogananda’s chants, and I realized that other people could chant, too, and I thought, “This is very good.” [Laughs]
I discovered that after chanting I was very still inside. I had tried meditating before I moved to California, but it had never quite worked for me, and even in the meditations with the apprentice group I still felt very restless. But after chanting I found myself feeling very calm, and I thought, “This is a good combination!”
I decided that I needed to learn to play the harmonium. I would listen to the person who led the chanting, and late at night I would leave my tent and walk down the hill to the temple at the apprentice village and plunk out the chants. I would hear the chant in my mind and find the first note, sing the note, hear it in my consciousness, and slowly string the notes together using my index finger and pumping the bellows. That was how I learned to play the harmonium, and one chant led to another until I had built up a repertoire of four, five, six, or seven chants.
Soon after I arrived, the Gandharvas sang some of Swamiji’s songs before a class at Spiritual Renewal Week. One of the songs was “The Secret of Laughter,” and coming from the kind of music I had been listening to for so long, I thought, “This is ridiculous – what a goofy little song!” [Laughs] I thought, “This is so simple…I cannot believe it!”
I was comparing it with the sophistication of jazz and jazz-fusion, and the talented musicians I had heard, and I thought, “The Secret of Laughter? Lu-ru-lu-ru-lay-roh? Joy will come to anyone…?” And I just didn’t get it.
That was my first week at Ananda, but I told myself to shut up and just listen. [Laughs] I told myself to keep the ego at bay and listen to what was being sung. So whenever I would hear the Gandharvas, I would shut up and just absorb the singing.
But I really liked the chanting, and over time I gradually acquired a taste for Swamiji’s “Songs of Divine Joy.” It was a slow road for me to begin to like his music, and then after six months I found myself invited to sing with a little performing group. I had never sung a song in my life, but I said yes. There were six of us, and they told me I was a bass, and I said okay. I didn’t even know what it meant, but I realized I could sing low, and the first song we worked on was “The Secret of Laughter.” [Laughs]
It was a big eye-opener. I learned the bass line and practiced singing it until I had memorized the part, and then I had the same experience as when I heard Yogananda’s voice for the first time, that singing this very simple song was changing something inside me. I had memorized the words, and I had the notes down correctly, and I was changing inwardly. The vibration of the song was having an effect on my consciousness, and it was something completely new for me. It didn’t give me confidence to sing, but I found that I felt really calm and inspired after singing these songs, even in rehearsal.
We premiered our new singing group at a Sunday service. We sang “The Secret of Laughter,” and I was so embarrassed and self-conscious! The basses were in the back row, and I deliberately stood behind somebody with lots of hair. I remember it was very frizzy hair, and I remember trying to hide behind it, and how my knee was moving because I was so nervous, and how I kind of moved it to the rhythm of the song.
After the service a long-time member of Ananda asked me if I’d been hiding. [Laughs] I said yes, and she grabbed my knee and said, “And don’t move your knee like that.” She said, “You can’t hide. You just have to sing!”
I said, “Okay,” and I slowly accepted the role of singing in a small group, because my doubts and self-consciousness weren’t strong enough to prevent me from singing, and the joy and peace I felt after singing was so strong.
Yogananda assigned particular qualities to many of his chants. In the first edition of Cosmic Chants, published in 1938, he described what each chant was good for. For example, he said that singing “Thou Art My Life” is good to “sweeten a sour disposition.” So anytime I was in a sour disposition, I would sing that song, and I would come out of it.
I learned more of the chants and songs, and I learned that when I was chanting, it was not really “I” who was doing the chanting, but that the vibration of the song or chant was coming through me. Over the years, I learned that, in fact, it’s better if Raghu doesn’t participate in the chant.
If it’s one of Master’s chants, I visualize Yoganandaji at the point between the eyebrows, and if it’s one of Swamiji’s chants, I visualize Swamiji and feel that he’s singing with me through the chant. If I’m singing a bhajan to Ganesha or Shiva or Krishna, I visualize one of the deities and offer the chant to them.
I’ve realized that chanting is forever new. I’ve sung some of the chants hundreds of times, and yet it always feels new and fresh, because the chants are so expansive and it’s never quite the same. Yoganandaji said that his Cosmic Chants are registered in the superconscious, and when I’m chanting I try to tune into a superconscious state that’s coming through the chant. Sometimes I chant with my eyes closed, even if it’s at a public kirtan, and sometimes I visualize that I’m chanting above the planet, and chanting out into the cosmos. I learned that you can’t space-out, and this is why at our kirtans we have brief meditations to give people a chance to go inside because the chants are very deep and expansive.
The experience of singing in the small group evolved over time. I realized that when everybody was spot-on with the music – when we were all in sync and on pitch – that the group had a unique vibration. I also realized that the vibration didn’t sit with the individual, but it came out through all of the individuals.
It feels as if it’s in front of us, going out like a wave. If you’re singing in a concert and you’re in tune with the group, you feel a connection with everybody you’re singing with, and when everybody is singing in sync, it creates a special vibration for each song. The people in the audience are touched by it, and it feels like it’s going beyond the audience and spreading that vibration into the universe.
When I lived in Palo Alto I had the good fortune to sing with some fine people – Sabari, Chaitanya, Ishani, Dambara, Karen, Pavani, and Amara. It was a great group, and we evolved together over the years. We sang for a long time together, and it was a joy. They were topflight singers, and they were all very much in tune.
I remember a thrilling experience we had. Swamiji had just written “Life Mantra,” and our group was practicing it in the back room of the Palo Alto temple. We were rehearsing to sing for Swamiji, who would be coming to Palo Alto to speak.
We would always chant AUM after our rehearsals, and as we were AUM-ing I heard a voice singing, “Life is a mission from above… Life is a quest for inner joy…”
We took a breath and AUM-ed again, and I heard, “God is life… God is joy…” It wasn’t a sound that was coming from the physical plane.
After the third AUM, we didn’t say anything. Finally, Chaitanya said, “Did anybody hear that?” And we all said, “Yes.”
It was thrilling, and at the same time it didn’t seem unusual. It was like “Of course – it’s the AUM vibration.” But it helped us realize that the songs that Swamiji wrote are part of the AUM vibration, and that if we sing them together, and if we do the best we can, it opens us to the vibration of AUM, and it can open others to the vibration of AUM.
Swamiji has often said, “If you want to know me, get to know my music.” Many of the people in the choir have been around Swami for years, but others have not. And speaking for myself, I find that singing Swamiji’s music has helped me tremendously to know him more deeply, and to meditate better and deeper. Our choir in Sacramento has been singing at Sunday service, and they’re getting to know Swamiji better. The choir has gone light years toward the AUM vibration. We know it from the feedback we receive from the audience, when they tell us after service how inspiring the singing was.
We certainly have Sundays when it doesn’t click perfectly, but we keep moving forward because we don’t associate ourselves with the praise or the mistakes. We associate our songs with the AUM vibration. Chaitanya would always tell the choir before a performance, “Expect a lot of grace.”
In the beginning, I judged the music with my mind, but I was strong with myself. I told myself to do what I had done all my life – just listen and don’t judge. After listening, I would sometimes wake up in the morning with a melody in my mind, and I would feel that there was something beyond the borders of what I had labeled as too “simple.”
I realized that the vibration of the music is everything. It’s why I urge new people to set the mind aside and just tune into the music – listen to the notes, listen to the words, and think about what’s being said, and how it registers not so much in the mind but in the heart. Then lift the heart to the spiritual eye, and that’s when you start to have the experience, and it will be different for everybody. It calmed me so that I could meditate better, and it made me realize that there’s much more to music than the complications of jazz.
The more complicated the music and the more impressive the musicianship, the more I liked it. But when I heard Yogananda’s chants, and when I started singing Swamiji’s songs, my heart started to open. My heart connected with the spiritual eye, and the music began to realign my awareness to an experience of depth and never-ending expansiveness.
That’s why I tell beginners that it’s good just to listen, just listen to what’s being sung and bring the vibration into your heart and don’t put a judgment on it. Don’t put the mind on it. It’s heart music. It’s “clarity of the heart” music. It can change your consciousness and it will change your consciousness.
When I was growing up I loved classical music. I particularly loved choral music – Chanticleer and the King’s College Singers. But now I’ve given up even that. I don’t listen to it anymore, not because it’s bad but because my consciousness has changed and now I just listen to Swamiji’s music. I have it playing in the background, and I have it playing in my consciousness.
I can’t even call it “Swamiji’s music,” because he receives it and shares it. He’s often said that it isn’t his music, because it flows through him and it flows through us, and when it flows through us it changes us. It changes our consciousness. And that’s the biggest thing. It can work on many levels. It’s a healing tool. It’s a great meditation tool. If you have problems meditating, it will give you depth. It can change your life.