Table of Contents
Part I — Prayer-world
- The need for prayer
- Mistakes made while praying
- The use of prayer
- Question: During my meditation I try to pray for health for my father because he's very sick. But sometimes I think that I want him to get better just to make me feel better. Is it all right to pray for my father so he will get better?
- Prayer: with words or without words?
- Prayer and meditation
- For what should we pray?
- Time for prayer
- Better to pray than not to
Part II — Mantra-world
- Question: Will you please speak about mantras?
- Question: Do you recommend the use of any special mantra?
- Question: What is the significance of the Gayatri mantra?
- Question: Can you please tell us about a few other mantras?
- Question: How quickly does a mantra remove desire from the mind?
- Question: I start my meditation by repeating my spiritual name a hundred times as you suggested, but I lose track of the count, so I have to go back and start over again.
- Question: Does everybody have his own mantra?
- Question: Before becoming your disciple, I took a course in meditation in which they taught me a mantra and told me to repeat it for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the afternoon. Is that the way I should continue meditating? I feel I can meditate more than that.
- Question: Can you tell us about the major psychic centres in the body and their mantras?
- Question: I have read that there are seven spiritual centres in the body, but you have just given us six.
AUM: The Mother of all mantras
- The significance of Aum
- Question: What happens when we chant AUM?
- Question: Should meditation always be preceded by chanting AUM?
- Question: Will you please tell me briefly about the soundless sound?
- Question: Guru, can the experience that AUM will give me be visual and auditory and will it bring me consciously closer to God?
- Question: How are we actually supposed to chant AUM?
- Question: Can we hear AUM inwardly if we can't say it out loud?
- Question: AUM is not a term which as meaningful to us in our culture.
Part III — Japa-world
- Question: When you close your eyes completely and hum that way, does that create a kind of hypnotism in your followers?
- Question: Are invocations important in meditation? Sometimes when we invoke you, we feel that it is because you are not with us that we have to invoke you.
- Question: I wish to know if chanting is a kind of meditation?
- Question: Will you please explain the difference between mantra and japa?
- Question: How effective is Japa Yoga?
- Question: Can japa be done at any time?
- Question: When I do japa, I feel more devotional if I chant your name, but at the same time, it seems more difficult to chant your name than to chant 'Supreme'. Should I do both?
- Question: If we don't have a spiritual name, is there any efficacy in chanting our given name?
- Question: When one chants AUM aloud fifty, sixty or a hundred times and then stops, is the AUM that continues up above the head in the silence related to the turiya state of consciousness?
