Page 24 - All India Magazine Sep-2026

Pranava Japa
It [Pranava japa] is supposed to have a force of its own al-
though that force cannot fully work without the meditation on
the meaning. But my experience is that in these things there is
no invariable rule and that most depends on the consciousness
or the power of response in the sadhak. With some it has no
effect, with some it has a rapid and powerful effect even with-
out meditation — for others the meditation is necessary for any
effect to come.
CWSA 29: 324

I did not encourage the name with the breathing because that
seemed like pranayam. Pranayam is a very powerful thing, but
if done haphazardly it may lead to the raising of obstructions
and even in extreme cases illness in the body.
CWSA 29: 327

The mantra Soham
A divine Name or a Mantra (like the So'ham) can enter the
adhara and move in the breathing as in your experience. When
it does so, that is not the opening of which I speak in the sen-
tence you quote, but it may come to make the aspiration effec-
tive by helping in the opening — by removing something that
prevents the opening and by leading to the experience it carries
in it.
The experience to which the So'ham mantra leads is the
realisation of one Being everywhere, all as the Divine, oneself
and all as essentially one with that Divine. It is an experience in
which one's separate personal existence shut up in the body
ceases to be the normal thing; one feels the body as a point or
small thing in a vast existence, consciousness or Ananda that is
the Divine and oneself as spread out in that vast consciousness

24 All India Magazine, September 2026