The word purascharana means practising your mantra. It can mean practising your mantra a set number of times or it can mean practising your mantra every day for a certain period. There are two stages to this practice. The first stage is that you decide that you will practise your mantra once or twice a year for one day, two days, three days or nine days, throughout the entire day. You might be practising your mantra every day for ten or fifteen minutes, or something like that, but once in a year you retire for one day if you are a very busy person and nine days if you can spare the time, or otherwise three days.
During these three days, from dawn to dusk, you only practise your mantra with the mala. No concentration, no meditation; only repetition of the mantra. Have a very light diet, for example, boiled vegetables, fruits and milk. Don’t eat meat, eggs, fish, etc. and no cereals or grains. This is the first step to purascharana.
After this kind of disciplined mantra practice for one, two or three years, and when you have sufficient experience and know that you can sit quietly for one, two or three hours, you go to the second stage of the practice. Every mantra has a certain number. For example, Namah Shivaya has 500,000. That means you resolve, ‘In fifteen days I will complete 500,000 mantras.’ 500,000 means 5,000 rounds of the mala. Each mala has 108 beads, but during counting it is considered only as 100, so 5,000 malas.
If you are going to practise it in fifteen days, divide 5,000 by 15. It comes to about 340 per day. That means in one day you have to practise 340 rounds of the mala. In one hour, you can do 40 malas only. It means you will need nine hours in one day for fifteen days. That is called one purascharana. Like this, devoted people practise many purascharana, year after year, year after year, to purify the mind and to experience the light.
This is only fifteen days, nine hours per day. Can you imagine that I did purascharana of Gayatri mantra? It has 2.4 million. And do you know how long that mantra is?
Om bhur, bhuvaha, suvaha Tat savittur varenyam Bhargo devasya dheemahi Dhiyo yonaha prachodayat.
In one hour it is only possible to do 4 malas. At one point I was tired and I had no time because I was in my guru’s ashram, working in the office and kitchen and I was the secretary and the manager of cash. In the day I used to work and at night after 8 o’clock, I used to sit on the bank of the Ganges and practise Gayatri. You know how many hours it took me? Every day I was practising it and it still took me eleven years. That is called purascharana.
In the path of kundalini awakening, mantra, purascharana, is very important. Otherwise, awakening of kundalini sometimes creates a sort of mental difficulty for you. When you practise purascharana before the awakening of kundalini, your mind is purified and your heart is clean. Your mind becomes fearless and you can easily handle the experiences of the awakening of kundalini.
24 February 1983, Chakra Seminar, Geneva, Switzerland