Deepak Chopra


Primordial Sound Meditation is a mantra-based practice that systematically allows the experience of quieter, more peaceful levels of the mind. A mantra is a specific sound, which when used silently, serves as a vehicle to connect with deeper aspects of consciousness. With its origins in the ancient Vedic tradition of India, Primordial Sound Meditation is the perfect antidote to modern stress.


A Technique for "Going Beyond"


Physical impurities in cells have their equivalents in the mind: fear, anger, greed, compulsivity, doubt, and other negative emotions. Operating at the quantum level, they can be as damaging to us as any chemical toxin. The mind body connection turns negative attitudes into chemical toxins, the so-called "stress hormones" that have been linked to many different diseases. Ayurveda lumps all negative tendencies together as "mental ama," which needs to be cleaned from the mind. But how?


It is not possible to purify the mind by thinking about it. A technique is required that goes beyond the domain where fear, anger, and all other forms of mental ama hold sway. This technique is meditation. If properly taught and used, meditation allows a person to become unstuck from the ama in his thoughts and emotions. The meditation technique known as Primordial Sound Meditation, as a simple, natural way of accomplishing this goal.


Primordial Sound Meditation is a meditation technique derived from the yoga tradition of India. Yoga means union-the union of environment, senses, body, mind, and soul. This union is described in an ancient text known as the Yoga Sutras written by the sage Patanjali, in which he explains that yoga is the progressive settling down of the mind into the field of pure silence, which is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind. When through meditation we are able to access the silent spaces between thoughts, we enter into the field of unbounded awareness.


The silence we experience in meditation is in the "gap" between thoughts. Glimpsing this field of quiet, expanded awareness allows us to recognize that our essential self is not the perpetual traffic of thoughts that fill our minds, but the silent witness to our thoughts, words, and actions.


Past actions (karmas) create memories, which generate desires (sanskaras), which in turn lead to new actions (vasanas). The seeds of these memories and desires are present at the level of our soul. It is this "software of the soul" that propels each of us to make choices that define our lives. Meditation helps us recognize that we are capable of making conscious choices that enable us to experience greater peace, love, and success and to enrich all aspects of life-body, mind, and spirit.