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Thomas Ashley-Farrand is one of the foremost authorities on Vedic
and Buddhist Sanskrit mantras in the West.

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Vedic and Buddhist Sanskrit mantras in the West.

Guy Spiro: Please give us the short version of your journey. How did this work come about?

Thomas Ashley Farrand: I didn’t get seriously started until I was thirty years old, but I did see a light as a child of about four years old. I would close my eyes and see a light and sing to it. I attended church by myself, as my parents weren’t religious. That fell away at about ten years old. I then lived a completely secular life until about thirty. I had a near death experience sitting on my couch working on a business project one day. A golden light appeared on the page in front of me, with some writing in it that was personal to me. While I was trying to figure out what was going on I started to leave my body. A hole opened up in my chest and a part of me started to descend into my heart and I realized that I was dying. I think I did something intelligent like screamed or yelled and in my moment of terror I thought that if I could possibly get to my feet maybe I could physically integrate all of these pieces. So I did stagger to my feet and wandered around for a while. Obviously I didn’t die, I’m here.

GS: Were you having a heart attack? Was there a medical condition?

TAF: No, it was a classical spiritual experience, probably from a past life. I realized I didn’t know anything, and I called the churches of my childhood. They just thought I was some nut and couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. Finally I saw an ad in a newspaper and called a yoga organization. They directed me to a teacher that told me that I had to read the Upanishads, which I did immediately, and within a couple of days read the Katha Upanshad and found exactly what happened to me in a scripture written 8,000 years ago. In it Yama, the God of death, describes the mysteries of the Cave of the Heart. It was extraordinary.

I realized that I had better find a teacher. It took me about six months. I found a teacher who made himself known to me essentially by showing me some of his spiritual abilities in very subtle ways, but that got my attention. I became a priest for him in his organization. That was in 1973 and I’ve been at it ever since. He took me around the world and introduced me to his buddies, mostly from India. They peeled me like an onion. It was wonderful and terrible all at the same time. There is a whole set of spiritual abilities anyone can have that they demonstrated on me and for me so that I would realize just what the potential was, and the fact that I may have potential. It was a rude awakening, a shock. I had a master’s degree by that time, and I realized that everything that I thought I knew of any importance was functionally useless in the spiritual world.

GS: What kind of demonstrations were done for you? What were you shown?

TAF: Things that some of your readers may know of. Electrical energy coming from the feet, like sticking your finger in a socket. Except rather than harm you it transforms, it clears out the junk in huge quantities. The same thing that Paramahansa did to young Ramakrishna Vivikananda when he was sixteen, and completely changed his life in about ten seconds. I experienced that from half a dozen different teachers, and other manifestations of Shakti that would take too long to explain in detail. There is energy available that can be directed consciously that we in the west have very little knowledge or understanding of. I certainly didn’t learn it in school, at my mother’s knee or at the Sunday school down the block. I met some of the big names of the day in the process, some of the Jagad gurus as they’re called in India, the world gurus, gurus to the tenth power. One was the one at Kanchi Math that some people may know of, Shankaracharya, and another one the follower of Madheacharya, Jagad guru at Pejowarmath. These are towering spiritual figures in India that we don’t hear of here.

Over the next few years, I was just sort of hanging on for dear life as they peeled the layers away. I learned spiritual disciplines and was initiated formally into various mantra practices which I practice to this day. We all have to do our part. I was given so much and then it was sort of like, O.K. fella, roll up your sleeves, time to get to work. It’s been extremely rewarding. Sometimes I wonder how I got to be so fortunate to have met these people and have this training.

GS: At some point you decided, or were told, it was time for you to go public?

TAF: Yes. In 1984, after about eleven years, my teacher made it very clear that it was time for me to go out on my own and start teaching what I had learned. With sadness and reluctance, I did so. I had grown quite attached to him as you may imagine, and he flexed his muscles to make sure I didn’t come running back.

I kept a low profile. I had one class that went for seven years on Wednesday nights. Then a little break and another class that ran for another seven years on Wednesday night. Everything changed in 1997. My teacher had said years ago that when he passed out of the physical body a lot of the energy that had kept him traveling and teaching for fifty years would come to a group of us. When he passed, which he did in December of 1997, my entire life changed. New energy came in, and within six months I had a book contract and an agent, and the public side of the mission began to rapidly expand. It was just like somebody had thrown a switch.

GS: And the book of course, is Healing Mantras.

TAF: Yes, and on October 1st, my next one, Shakti Mantras, will be released. I have numerous products from Sounds True. I have a Puja DVD coming out this fall called Panchaj Devata Puja which means “ceremonies in honor of life deities.” And frankly, it feels like it’s just getting starting even though it’s been five years.

GS: You’ve got a wild ride ahead of you. I saw a billboard the other day for one of the mainstream import stores that used the word mantra in it. Have you seen that?

TAF: No, but words like Mantra and Guru have become part of the current modern lexicon. We think of a mantra as some phrase that’s repeated. But of course, mantra has a classical and specific definition from the ages. There are lots of scriptures in India but I’m going to talk about two. One is from the masculine side and one from the feminine. The masculine is the set of scriptures called the Shiva Sutras. Sutras just means verses. Shiva is the great masculine principle of consciousness. The other one is the Lakshmi Tantra, or the primeval power of the great feminine. Both of them say exactly the same things. First they say that the nature of power is feminine, not masculine. Second they say that the source of this power is in certain primal or primary vibrations, fifty in number, that they call the Matrika or the great mother. This is a direct quote from the Shiva Sutras: She who binds and she who sets free. These fifty sounds are inscribed as they were on the petals of chakras one through six leading from the base of the spine through the brow center, excluding the seventh at the top of the head. Each petal vibrates in specific resonance to one of these great Sanskrit primal sounds and is the Sanskrit alphabet. These sounds are hardwired into your chakras. All you need is the software to make them go, and the software is the spiritual formulas that have very specific outcomes that were tested and cataloged by the sages thousands of years ago.

GS: So this is so, whether or not you’re an Easterner or a Westerner?

TAF: Yes, it’s part of our spiritual physiology as it were. The irony is that there are probably fewer than 200 people in the world that can carry on a conversation in Sanskrit. However there are millions and millions that use it as a spiritual language and spiritual discipline. It’s been kept under wraps. That was one of the jobs of the Buddha. The power of the formulas began to leak from the religious sector into the secular world, and merchants and generals began to understand that mantras would make them successful. This threatened to create havoc and chaos. One of the jobs of the Buddha was to put a clamp on it, and when he came he said, “you don’t need the priests, you don’t need the mantras, you don’t need any of this stuff.” Within 100 years the power of the mantras went back from public to secret.

GS: Part of the Buddha’s mission was to put that genie back in the bottle?

TAF: Yes, well said.

GS: And now you are releasing that genie again?

TAF: Yes. That was part of the specific purpose that my teacher came for. What happened around the time of the Buddha and afterwards is that people began to understand power, not as a personal phenomenon, but as an organizational phenomenon. The great cultural understanding of power shifted from the personal. People in power today seek power through organizations, through technology, through machinery. The last thing they think about is personal power, except using will to quit smoking or lose a little weight. In fact there are other kinds of power entirely that anyone can use, but our assumptions are such that these ideas are held up to ridicule. It’s the perfect disguise. Those who have some innate understanding of it are naturally attracted to it through a self-selecting mechanism. It works very well. You won’t find many people in government that would use mantra to try to gain supremacy. They’d think it was laughable, and the sages think that’s just fine.

The people that are attracted to this really are practitioners from past lives anyway. And there’s a lot of them born, millions in present day. The world is sitting in a very interesting place. It’s no secret that the acceleration of events today is moving at breakneck speed. It seems to me that, where great spiritual decisions are made, it has been determined that as many people as possible on the positive side of things should make as much progress as they can spiritually during the present period of time. So people like me are sent out to the hinterlands, “Here ye, here ye.”

GS: It’s the nature of the emerging age that what has been kept secret is revealed. Go back just to the early 70s. What was available? I tiny fraction of what there is now. How exactly does mantra work?

TAF: Turn on a television set and assuming one is using rabbit ears, but even if it’s by satellite, all of a sudden from the air around us there is sound and pictures, it’s miraculous. That energy is around us all the time, radio energy, television energy, microwave energy, telephone energy, it’s all there. All you need is an instrument to tune it in. Similarly, there is spiritual energy around us all the time, as the physicists would say, in the “near surround.” But the instrument for tapping into that energy is our own bodies, physical and subtle. There are a variety of ways for getting at this energy, even through simple prayer. I don’t want to suggest that Sanskrit is the only way, there are many ways. But Sanskrit Mantra is the tool that has been given to me, and that is the one I talk about.

When you begin to chant the ancient formulas, the petals on the chakras begin to resonate in the ways seen by the ancient Rishis and Sages, and they begin to pull in minute amounts of spiritual energy — tiny, but a definite amount. Over days, weeks and months, depending upon the level of intensity of chanting and so forth, larger and larger amounts of energy accumulate in the subtle body bringing health, radiance and eliminating karma, which allows desires to be fulfilled. If someone has a desire, or difficulty in getting something, then there has been some karmic bump in the road that has to be overcome. The energy from mantras can work through that, which is how mantras work in helping us achieve our objectives, by working off karma. Ultimately of course, the object of all of this is to advance spiritually.

It’s almost like the mantras fulfilling our desires are little pebbles in the road that are brightly colored, and we like and want them while we’re being led down the road to greater and greater spiritual development. Eventually we arrive at a much greater capacity to hold spiritual charge. When that happens, the kundalini, the great feminine power cell at the base of the spine, releases additional amounts of energy into the spine and chakras so we get a second net gain in usable spiritual energy. So essentially, from one practice you have two results. First the result of pulling in the energy from the near surround, and second the corresponding release of energy from the kundalini shakti. Eventually they get to the point where there are significant changes in the state of consciousness of the individual, the great “ah-has” that are experienced along the path. That’s it in a nutshell.

GS: So the various syllables you say are the Sanskrit alphabet and they are put together in various combinations according to the desired result.

TAF: The ancient Sages saw that it didn’t matter what the occupation was, whether a farmer or a weaver, the spiritual state was the same. That’s because the spiritual physiology was the same.

GS: What do you think of the music of Jai Uttal, Deva Premal and others working along the same lines?

TAF: I think they’re just wonderful. In some cases they’re taking the ancient sound and writing heavenly music. I think Primal is a celestial musician and they are promulgating the ancient wisdom in a way that almost goes right behind the mind as it were and gets right into the energy. It produces joy and, at the same time, when they sing like that, they are moving along spiritually.

GS: You don’t find it to be trivializing.

TAF: Not in the least. There’s a whole class of spiritual beings called Gandharvas, celestial musicians.

GS: The individual syllable that is the one most known to people is OM.

TAF: The seed sound towards the Ajna chakra at the brow center. Each chakra has a principle that rules it, starting from the bottom: earth, water, fire, air, ether, and mind at the sixth chakra. OM begins to develop the higher faculties of mind. Eventually all of the abilities and states of consciousness of the other chakras come under the dominion or control of the mind.

GS: I was told a long time ago, and I always wondered about the veracity of this, that OM could be used as a more or less universal dissolvent — to cleanse negativity.

TAF: If you mean by that, “dissolving everything back into its source,” I would agree. Everything dissolves back into it’s higher state. Although there isn’t time to go into the details, earth eventually dissolves back into water, water into fire, into air, air into ether and ether into mind. So in that sense, certainly. Mind can exist at a high level outside any of the needs for a body. So in that sense, all of it would dissolve back into mind; so it all depends on how you want to say it. On it’s face, it’s true. But it is not simple.

The 89th Upanishad teaches formulas specifically for dissolving unneeded, unnecessary chunks of karma standing in our way. It begins with OM but it is Ganesha formula for removing obstacles, and this formula really is based upon unity. If things are in unity, there are no obstacles. I’ll chant it three times.

OM GUM GANA PATAYEI NAMAHA
OM GUM GANA PATAYEI NAMAHA
OM GUM GANA PATAYEI NAMAHA

In workshops when I chant this formula, it takes me a good fifteen minutes to explain the ins and outs of the a Ganesha principle and how it works. It’s fascinating. It eliminates obstacles that may exist between you and the fulfillment of some desire by dissolving the karma and achieving unity. That’s the summary of it; there is a specific mechanism that it uses. It’s really an interesting kind of formula even though it’s very simple. You don’t even have to know what the obstacle is, and therein lies the beauty. I have tested this formula myself and found it to be extremely advantageous.

GS: Well we touched on this earlier — it’s time for all of this from all the different directions.

TAF: I tell people, look, it’s a big orchestra. Some of us are violin players, some of us are flute players. The trick is to find your instrument. It may be Sanskrit Mantra, it may be Kabbalah. It may be something else. Just find your instrument and, having found it, play it for all it’s worth.

GS: Do you have a closing statement?

TAF: Yes, what the world needs now is peace. There is a very short mantra, OM SHANTI OM, that, if you take a little time everyday to say it, will help contribute to world peace. Just put that simple vibration in the air while you’re driving your car, taking a walk … we do need it so.

Thomas Ashley-Farrand will be conducting three workshops at Healing Earth Resources the weekend of September 5 through 7.

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