by Yogi Ananda Satyam (Salvatore Familia)
..Through song may we find hearing fraught with plenty.
Rg Ved 10.101.3
Welcome to An Evening of Sacred Songs at Yoga Anand Ashram. Tonight we will enter a time and place that has been invoked by men and women in ancient time as well as today, throughout the world and in this Ashram in Amityville, NY. By opening the way for us to sing and hear sacred songs, GuruMa has occasioned a great celebration allowing us to participate in the sacred movement of life that has been most clearly demonstrated to us in her life and made known through her actions, teachings, poetry and songs.
Why are the songs we hear tonight sacred? No song can be said to be truly absent of sacred ground. But it would be a misunderstanding to say that every song is sacred. Take for example the songs we hear most, the popular songs of today and yesterday that surround us everyday. There are songs to sell products, songs to move the passions, songs to stir the emotions, songs to instill a sense of patriotism, rebellion or compliance. there are songs that celebrate what is most base in humanity: greed, selfish desire, lust, pity, depression; and songs to elevate our spirits or purge the confused stirrings of the mind: love song, anthems, dirges, and lamentations. But these songs remain grounded in the movement of life’s afflictions (klesa), concerned with the conventional cares of pleasure and pain. The Greek philosopher Plato was so certain that songs such as these opposed wisdom and virtue that in his ideal city of the Republic, a city he know could never come to be, he proposed banning them. Popular songs are de-sacrilized, uprooted from the knowledge and wisdom of spiritual insight. The songs we will hear tonight bear no relation to them.
Sacred songs are never grounded in topicality and conventional concerns. They beckon the hearer to enter a sacred time and place: they invoke the listener’s participation in the Vision out of which they originated. How do they do this? To begin with, the subjects of most popular songs such as pleasure and pain, self and other, gain and loss, love and hate, which can be categorized as the opposites or extremes of conventional living, are abandoned. There concerns only appear in sacred songs as pulsating manifestations (prakrti), the rhythmic harmonies of life that are experienced by the silent witness, the unchanging pure consciousness (purusa) that together with prakrti give rise to all life. Instead of singing of love lost or gained, sacred songs sing of the interplay of all relationships. Instead of lamenting over the bitter or rejoicing over the sweet, they demonstrate how these oppositions are the way (rta) of life, shared by all, at all times. It is only our attachment and identification with one and our aversion to the other that causes suffering and frustration (dhukha). Sacred songs can also sing the praises of the techniques or sadhana that overcome this suffering, for example, bearing extremes, or opposites (tapas) rather than indulging in them emotionally. This is the power of sound, melody rhythm when they are united with lyrics that demonstrate the rta or the sacred movement of life as well as the path or vision (darsana) that allow one to fully embody the sacred.
When a sacred song is sung or heard authentically, with egocentric experience (asmita) sacrificed, the song, the singer and the hearer unite and the sacred ground of the song becomes one’s embodiment. Once can then share in the ageless wisdom encoded in the lyric, melody and rhythm of the song. The songs originated spontaneously through the vision of one deeply grounded in the sacred. Sacred songs take the inner language of unitive experience and make it external, manifest or public. We are fortunate indeed to have the opportunity to participate in this evening of sacred songs.
Having reflected on this night, let us join together with the Rsis of the Rg Veda and say:
You wise singers, bring forth your sacred songs.
Rg Veda 10.111.