Why is singing of great importance in spirituality? || Acharya Prashant, on Guru Kabir (2018)

Acharya Prashant

8min

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Why is singing of great importance in spirituality? || Acharya Prashant, on Guru Kabir (2018)

Questioner (Q): What is the best way to approach the beautiful poetry of Kabir? There are so many of them and they often contain language and idioms that are not easy to understand. Yet something within responds to them even if the mind doesn’t comprehend them fully. How to get the most out of them?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Sing with a Kabir, or sing Kabir with yourself. That’s the best thing. The best thing is to sing. But we have become very, very unmusical. Our instruments have lost their tuning. We have forgotten to sing. We have lost all verse. So, the fallout of that is that your Acharya Ji has to laboriously speak in prose, and therefore he has to speak so much. Otherwise, two lines of a Kabir are much more than sufficient. And even after speaking so much, do I even come close to what he said? I don’t.

Sing. There is no alternative to that.

Q: Without knowing the meaning?

AP: Know the meaning and sing. He definitely wanted you to know the meaning and sing, and that’s why he sang in the language of the people. Had he just wanted you to croon anything unintelligible, then why would he compose in the very language of the ordinary people? Why did he do that? Because he wanted you to also know the literal meaning of his words. If I can help you know the literal meaning of his words, good; to that extent, use me. But do sing.

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