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The biggest obstacle in my Ashram experience is not meditation, actually. That’s difficult, of
course, but not murderous. There’s something even harder for me here. The murderous thing
is what we do every morning after meditation and before breakfast (my God, but these morn-
ings are long)—a chant called the Gurugita. Richard calls it “The Geet.” I have so much
trouble with The Geet. I do not like it at all, never have, not since the first time I heard it sung
at the Ashram in upstate New York. I love all the other chants and hymns of this Yogic tradi-
tion, but the Gurugita feels long, tedious, sonorous and insufferable. That’s just my opinion, of
course; other people claim to love it, though I can’t fathom why.
The Gurugita is 182 verses long, for crying out loud (and sometimes I do), and each verse
is a paragraph of impenetrable Sanskrit. Together with the preamble chant and the wrap-up
chorus, the entire ritual takes about an hour and half to perform. This is before breakfast, re-
member, and after we have already had an hour of meditation and a twenty-minute chanting
of the first morning hymn. The Gurugita is basically the reason you have to get up at 3:00 AM
around here.
I don’t like the tune, and I don’t like the words. Whenever I tell anyone around the Ashram
this, they say, “Oh, but it’s so sacred!” Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don’t choose to
sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.
The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it’s an excerpt from a holy ancient
scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and little of which
has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it’s written in the form of a
conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is between the goddess Parvati
and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment
of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy
of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He
dreams it; she materializes it. Their dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the
universe and its manifestation.
In the Gurugita, the goddess is asking the god for the secrets of worldly fulfillment, and he
is telling her. It bugs me, this hymn. I had hoped my feelings about the Gurugita would