Chanting: No Frills Spiritual Guidance

Chanting: No Frills Spiritual Guidance

Discovering Spirit in Sound: Chanting (Rober Gass: 2000)

Gass discusses comparative global religious chants from a spiritualistic perspective which Dalai Lama claims is largely lacking in the modern world. The time and dedication millions once devoted to religious practice has been surmounted through a push towards excessive individualism which leaves many in the developed world feeling isolated from their internalized culutrally communal religious values. These then attempt to fill their hearts longings through material consumption and end up searching for their satisfactions through insignificant pursuits and shallow self-analysis. These often choose to pursue false gods rather than contemplate world religions themselves. Instead they purchase salts and scents, fringes and chips of the core of human experience, which is often religious faithfulness versus particularist belief systems. In so doing, through attempts to impose their individualist minds upon their culturally defined elements of faithfulness, they end up surrendering mostly to slick advertising and marketing campaigns.

Gass has obviously contributed greatly to a vast polity which yearns for some communal connection and individual spiritual development oftentimes devoid of religious affiliation. Basically, if people are pursuing the kinds of virtues eschewed through the major world religions such as compassion, forgiveness, and prayerfulness then I think chanting is a natural booster for their well-being.

However Gass admits that he is drawn to non-religious spirituality through a discomfort with religion. At times his text is informative, yet at other times it feels far too rushed in its desire to again line up some of the regular modern spiritual practioners and diviners with historically rich religious values as if to say they are of equal standing. It is like saying that a goat may feed spiritually the same way as a sacred cow might. Under the light of comparisons it is a good book for someone with no religious values willing to learn a little about the traditional values of others out of respect for them and trying to explore them in a non-threatening manner without having to necessarily glorify them.