Kirtan

The Mayapuris in Brisbane, at Atma Yoga - Monday 24 October 6pm. Tickets $20 pre / $30 on the night. Dinner included!

Word!

Damodarastakam in Sanskrit with English rendition by Krishna Dharma prabhu.

• Download Krishna Dharma's Damodarastakam (English rendition) 11MB, 24 minutes, .mp3
• Kindle version of the words
• PDF version of the words

We are singing it this Saturday at the Damodara program, so I'll try to get you a more up-to-date recording. This one is from 2009 - but the Kindle and pdf versions of the words are fresh.

(1)
namamisvaram sac-cid-ananda-rupam
lasat-kundalam gokule bhrajamanam
yasoda-bhiyolukhalad dhavamanam
paramrstam atyantato drutya gopya

I bow down to Damodara, the form of full joy,
eternity and wisdom, within Vrindavan.
Whose shining earrings swung as he so swiftly ran
from mother Yashoda who caught that naughty boy.

(2)
rudantam muhur netra-yugmam mrjantam
karambhoja-yugmena satanka-netram
muhuh svasa-kampa-trirekhanka-kantha-
sthita-graivam damodaram bhakti-baddham

Captured by Yashoda, crying repeatedly,
he rubs his reddish eyes with his trembling hands.
On his conchlike neck his necklace shakes as he pants.
I bow down to Damodara, bound but by bhakti

(3)
itidrk sva-lilabhir ananda-kunde
sva-ghosam nimajjantam akhyapayantam
tadiyesita-jnesu bhaktair jitatvam
punah prematas tam satavrtti vande

Thus bathing Gokula in a great lake of bliss;
he shows love defeats him, devoid of reverence.
Conquered only by those in complete confidence,
I offer him unlimited loving praises.

(4)
varam deva moksam na moksavadhim va
na canyam vrne ‘ham varesad apiha
idam te vapur natha gopala-balam
sada me manasy avirastam kim anyaih

I beg not from you Lord, who can grant any boon,
even liberation or life in your abode.
Let memories of Gopala be ever bestowed,
for what other favour offers such great fortune?

(5)
idam te mukhambhojam atyanta-nilair
vrtam kuntalaih snigdha-raktais ca gopya
muhus cumbitam bimba-raktadharam me
manasy avirastam alam laksa-labhaih

Your dark, crimson hued curls encircle your face,
lovely like a lotus, with lips of ruby red;
kissed by Yashoda; within my mind be seated.
A billion other boons could not grant such grace

(6)
namo deva damodarananta visno
prasida prabho duhkha-jalabdhi-magnam
krpa-drsti-vrstyati-dinam batanu
grhanesa mam ajnam edhy aksi-drsyah

O Damodara, Ananta, O almighty Vishnu,
I fall down prostrate, pray be pleased upon me.
Blinded and sinking in a sea of misery,
grace me with your glance that I shall ever see you.

(7)
kuveratmajau baddha-murtyaiva yadvat
tvaya mocitau bhakti-bhajau krtau ca
tatha prema-bhaktim svakam me prayaccha
na mokse graho me ’sti damodareha

Dear Damodara, the sons of Kuvera you saved,
while a baby, by breaking the trees they became.
As you granted them prema, pray grant me the same,
I want not salvation, your love alone I crave.

(8)
namas te ’stu damne sphurad-dipti-dhamne
tvadiyodarayatha visvasya dhamne
namo radhikayai tvadiya-priyayai
namo ‘nanta-lilaya devaya tubhyam

I bow down to the bright rope that binds your belly,
within which the cosmos is completely contained.
To your beloved Radha I bow yet again,
and to you the hero who plays wonderfully.

If you have only one tool in your sound toolbox for a 24 hour kirtan, it should be reverb.

In this video from the recent Canberra 24 hour kirtan I used my Zoom 1202 reverb unit to give Janardana's voice more "epic".

Reverb and perception - psycho-acoustics

The sound captured by the recording device differs from the sound in the room. In the recording the reverb effect is more pronounced. Try this experiment: next time you attend mangal-arati in a temple, record it, then listen to the recording. What you will notice is that in the recording you'll hear an echo-ey reverb sound that you didn't hear in the temple while you were there. The reason for this is that the brain interprets the live sound with reverb cancellation. It is there "colouring" the sound, but you don't consciously perceive it, unless you are specifically listening for it - and even then it takes some training to bring it to conscious awareness.

When you listen to a recording in a different space, however, your brain doesn't do the same cancellation. Consider this: as you listen to the recording of Janardana singing in this 24 hour kirtan you are consciously aware of the reverb on his voice, and it sounds artificial.

However, you are not aware of the reverb in the room that you are in - but it is there. The recording is playing, and your brain is psycho-acoustically cancelling out the reverb effect of the room that you are in. So for people in that room while Janardana was singing live, the reverb effect was perceived differently. If you were there, you'll know what I'm talking about. It didn't sound like that.

Compare Janardana's kirtan with this one, from 2:30am, where I was singing into a mic with no reverb:

A couple of things: there's "no obvious reverb effect" on my voice compared to Janardana's voice; and you're still not conscious of the reverb sound of the space you're listening in right now. Try making a recording of your voice in that room, and you'll notice it on playback.

Using reverb in a live mix

The idea with reverb is to be subtle. It's an effect - not a component. It should be felt, not heard - like a spice. Enough to modify the taste, but not as an overpowering taste in its own right. If you spice a meal right, people should say: "That tasted great!", not: "That tasted like paprika". Diners ask great chefs for their recipe, because it's not immediately apparent what has been done to make it taste so great; and so it should be for live mixing. A common give-away of an amateur is to crank up the reverb until it screams: "O Hai! I'm putting reverb on the vocal!"; at which point they feel satisfied that they've put enough reverb on it - because it now sounds like there is reverb on it.

The idea is actually to not make it sound like it has reverb on it, but to create a different spatial awareness in the minds of the audience; to use the reverb effect to transport the audience into another realm. It creates a mystical experience that makes the kirtan "larger than life".

A handy technique is to push the reverb up until it is consciously perceivable as "a reverb effect" in the room, then roll it back so that it disappears from conscious awareness as reverb, and instead appears as "epic".

The Zoom 1202 is a mid-90's reverb effect that I bought 30 minutes before the gig from a Cash Converter's, during Gaura Vani's 2009 Australian tour. On that tour we used it to amazing effect on an auxiliary channel, piping the flute and vocals into it.

Stereo panning is an obvious way to create separation between components in a mix (vocals, instruments, etc), but you can use reverb to achieve a similar effect when mixing in mono, by placing instruments and vocals in different "spaces" through reverb. If a sound has a different reverb setting, then the brain will perceive it as existing in a different space, thus separating it psycho-acoustically in the mix.

When using reverb in this way, nudge the reverb up on different components at various times to cause them to "feature" in the mix.

Rather than setting and forgetting, actively work the faders and the reverb sends to bring mix components to the fore. The best way to do it is to bring something up, either in volume or in reverb space, then fade it back down into the mix. The effect of this is to colour the mix. Once the brain has been made aware of a mix component, even when the mix component retreats back into the same space as the other mix components, the mind is still aware of it. So you don't need to get into the volume war, where you make the overall level of the mix progressively louder. Instead, bring things up, then fade them back.

The effect of doing this will be to make the whole experience more epic for the audience. Think of yourself as a tour guide pointing out notable features to the audience, then allowing them to fade into the distance as you pass them.

Remember: the effect of reverb should be felt; reverb should not be heard.

Here is today's effort: a recording of Om Namo Shivaya. I've mashed up two different Jai Uttal melodies here. I'd like to have spent more time on recording the vocal, but it's gun and run in the lead-up to the Insync kirtan on Friday.

• Om Namo Shivaya (mp3, 5.2MB, 3:05)

A little bit of the tattva of Shiva, for your entertainment and edification:

In today's modern scientific culture we treat mythology, history, and metaphysics as separate things. The Vedic culture, in contrast, sees these three things as inseparable aspects of the same thing - reality.

Shiva-tattva (the "truth" about Shiva), and in fact any Vedic tattva (understanding) is impossible to grasp using the Western approach. Very quickly one becomes overwhelmed by what seems like contradictory statements and frankly unrelated material.

Let us examine these different aspects of Shiva - historical, mythological, and metaphysical - in isolation, as the Western approach would have us; and then examine them in the integrated Vedic worldview.

Shiva - mythological

In Hindu mythology Shiva is the destroyer god. He is in charge of universal devastation as well as any principle of deterioration or disorder during the lifetime of the manifested universe. He is depicted as covered in crematorium ashes, carrying a trident and playing a drum, dancing the Tandava-nrtya - the dance of destruction.

He has two wives - his first Sati, immolated herself; and with his second wife, Parvati, he had a son Ganesh, whose head he severed and then replaced with an elephant head.

Shiva is worshiped by yogis and others who desire liberation (kaivalya) from samsara, the cycle of birth and death.

Shiva - historical

Presented by Bhaktivinoda Thakura as a western understanding of Shiva's history: as the Aryans drove down from the North of India they encountered many indigenous peoples with their own modes of worship. In one area Shiva was worshiped.

The cultural dynamic of the Aryans, which gave rise to the Vedic culture, was to assimilate other religions and cultures. We see the same thing in modern Western culture, much of it arising from the expansion of the Roman Empire. Think about it - what do the Crucifixion of Christ, bunny rabbits, and chocolate eggs have in common?

The story of the assimilation of Shiva worship into the Aryan culture is told in the Srimad Bhagavatam 4th Canto. Daksa is an Aryan noble who performs the regular Vedic sacrifices. The word has gone out: "Shiva is in". Daksa, as a light-skinned Aryan is a little racist and says: "We ain't having no black-faced fella here!"

According to the story, he has his head chopped off and replaced with the head of a goat as the result - a clear cautionary tale that Shiva is bona fide and discrimination against him will result in dire consequences. Around this time Shiva's black skin becomes covered with crematorium ash, conveniently making him white.

Shiva - metaphysical

Shiva the metaphysical principle is described as the aggregate consciousness of the living entities trapped in samsara. If you imagine a multi-faceted jewel, each of the individual faces is a jiva - an individual soul; that's you and me. The whole jewel, however, is Shiva.

In this way, metaphysically Shiva is a superset identity that includes all of us. Shiva is described in the Brahma-samhita as "Vishnu transformed in contact with the material nature". Just as milk turns to yoghurt when curdled with an appropriate agent, similarly when the jivas come into contact with the material energy, maya, their aggregated super-identity is transformed - from Vishnu to Shiva.

Shiva is therefore one aspect of brahman, the sum total of reality.

The idea that the soul exists and is separate from the body is an interesting one, and one that is easy to understand on reflection. My body and my mind are changing. The hands on the clock turn, the pages of the calendar turn; time passes, day follows night - and yet I remain somehow suspended in one eternally present moment watching all of this happening, just as someone may stand on a river bank and watch the water flow past, carrying so many things with it.

So it is with the soul - it is the witness, the observer.

The idea, however, that the individual souls have aggregated identity, Shiva - and further, Vishnu - is a novel one. In the Vedic culture it is explained by reference to introspection through the practice of mystic yoga and the experience of elevated states of consciousness, and to divine revelation. In the end both are one: Tattva-darsibhih, those who are seers of the truth become speakers of truth.

Reintegrating Shiva

These three different things seem like quite a mash-up, from a contemporary perspective. Allow me to show how these three things flow seamlessly together in the Vedic approach to reality:

In AD 820 a celibate monk who became known as Adi Shankaracarya [wikipedia] left his body at the age of 33. Historically his existence is certain, although the exact date is unclear. The Vedic approach to history doesn't fixate on, and hence record dates the same way the Western approach does.

In his short life he had established a powerful new religious philosophy, and a monastic order with centers across Southern India.

He was considered to be an incarnation of Shiva, whose appearance and mission were foretold in scripture. Shankara is a name of Shiva; acarya means teacher. In one Purana (metaphysics presented as historical/mythological stories) Shiva is recorded as telling his wife Parvati that he will appear as a teacher and present a confusing philosophy that will contain some elements of truth and some misdirection.

Shankaracarya taught that the soul is different from the body, and that there is ultimately an underlying reality of oneness between all souls.

One of the best-known songs that he wrote expands on the words of an Upanishad: "Shivo 'ham" - I am Shiva - pure, blissful consciousness (Click here to hear Dave Stringer singing this song).

A later song, Bhaja Govindam, advocates devotion to a transcendental personality, and Adi Shankara's statement "Narayano paro 'vyaktat" supports the idea of transcendental personality. However, he is best known for the "not this, not that" (neti neti) approach to establishing the difference between purusha (soul) and prakrti (matter). Also, in the philosophical system that has been propounded by his followers up to today involves the idea that contact with the material energy (maya) is not just the cause of the transformation of the aggregate identity of the jivas from Vishnu to Shiva, but is also the cause of the appearance of individuality.

The idea there is that upon liberation individual existence ceases, and the individual identity is merged back into the totality of transcendent consciousness. This doctrine bears a remarkable similarity to Buddhist doctrine of nirvana, where the individual existence ceases, and the individual identity is simply extinguished - "like a candle going out".

At the time that Shankaracarya presented his philosophy Buddhism was the dominant school of thought in India. After Shankaracarya, Buddhism spread to Asia, where it remains a significant force today, specifically because Shankaracarya's school of thought expelled its influence from India.

Some people say that this historical context is the cause of Sankaracarya's presentation of a post-liberated state that bears a remarkable similarity to the Buddhist idea, and that his songs such as Bhaja Govindam reveal his true stance on the matter. The Bhagavat Purana proclaims: "Vaisnavanam Shambhu" - (and) among Vaisnavas (devotees of Vishnu), Shiva is foremost.

So, hopefully that goes some way to showing how these things - mythology, history, and metaphysics - are all intertwined in a Vedic approach to reality.

I'm working on the chord charts for the kirtan at Insync Institute next Friday.

Here's a track that I recorded for it:

• Radha Ramana Haribol (mp3, 6.5MB)

This is the radio edit version. I did a five minute one to show each part of the kirtan clearly, so that people can learn it easily from the chord chart.

Then, on Prema Yogi's suggestion, I did this sub-4 minute radio edit, which follows a standard pop song structure: intro, verse x 2, pre-chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, solo, mega-chorus, outro.

The sounds are all Korg MicroX presets, and I ran my voice through the Antares AVP-1 (rack mounted Autotune unit).

I got the original melody from Jai Uttal. The bass moving in the opposite direction from the keyboard in the chorus was Vrajadhama's idea.

I'm pleased with the way that it's turned out - it kind of starts abruptly because I wasn't paying much attention when I started to put it together, it's just a rough demo.

I'll see if Param has enough of her voice back tomorrow to record a vocal track for it. I'll copy Dave Stringer's technique of having a woman tracking his vocal on the call, and see how that sounds.

I'll also be working on Devakinanda Gopala and Om Namah Shivaya tomorrow.

In order to express yourself you have to feel comfortable. And in order to feel comfortable, you have to practice

- Krishna Kishora

In each of the Australian cities they've visited on this tour, Gaura Vani and As Kindred Spirits have held a kirtan workshop for local musicians, artists, and kirtan singers. In Melbourne, the rehearsal for the Ratha Yatra festival finale functioned in the same way.

Here is the end of the song on the night:

Last night Gaura Vani sang a version of James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend".

Introducing it, he explained that Sri Caitanya, the 15th century inaugurator of the bhakti kirtan movement, had brought sacred music into the street and public life. In this way he spiritualised the world by bringing the sacred into the mundane. With merging this song of James Taylor with the maha-mantra, Gaura explained that he was doing the same thing, in reverse: spiritualising the mundane by bringing it in touch with the sacred.

Actually, there is precedent for this in the life of Sri Caitanya.

During the Ratha Yatra festival, a once-a-year public procession of the Deities who are otherwise kept in an exclusive temple, Sri Caitanya recited a verse in ecstasy:

"That very personality who stole away my heart during my youth is now again my master. These are the same moonlit nights of the month of Caitra. The same fragrance of mālatī flowers is there, and the same sweet breezes are blowing from the kadamba forest. In our intimate relationship, I am also the same lover, yet still my mind is not happy here. I am eager to go back to that place on the bank of the Revā under the Vetasī tree. That is my desire."

- Caitanya-caritamrita Madhya-lila 1.58

This verse is actually a verse 2.272 in the Rasarnava Sudhakara, a treatise on Sanskrit drama and poetry written by Simhabhupal.

Rupa Goswami understood the meaning of this in the context of Sri Caitanya's inner mood, and he composed a further verse to explain it within the context of Sri Caitanya's transcendental ecstasy.

So this is a precedent, or parallel, in the life of Sri Caitanya for seeing Vrindavan everywhere, even in contemporary secular arts, and for bridging the gap between the two.

Of course, the traditional Sanskrit arts are never far away from transcendental topics to begin with. And some contemporary Western arts are easy to harmonise than others. This song by James Taylor seems like an especially low-hanging fruit for such an endeavour.

As Srila Prabhupada liked to say: "Just add Krishna".

While chanting overnight on Ekadasi, as was his custom, Akincana Krishnadas Babaji was approached by devotees who knew that he was expert in kirtan, and who wanted to learn more melodies and mrdanga beats from him. After sitting and chanting japa with him for several hours, one of them ventured: "Maharaja, we have brought mrdanga and cartals. Shall we do kirtan?"

Knowing their intent, Akincana Krishnadas Babaji replied: "No. Tonight no disturbance. Just harinam", and went back to chanting on his beads.

- One of my favorite stories

Sydney just finished an epic 40 hour kirtan. I watched large sections of it via the internet, and am looking forward to getting my hands on the recordings.

Now I am thinking: where do you go from a 40 hour kirtan?

Of course there is true Akhanda-nam "non-stop chanting of the Holy Name", such as is going on in Vrndavan year in and year out. But for communities in the West, embedded in cities and household life: what's next? A 48 hour kirtan? A 72 hour kirtan? The 108 hour kirtan that Nitai das RNS has been promising?

How about a 24 hour continuous kirtan of a single melody, with no one leading it, just continuous singing? I'd be down for that.