Unless Pramananda Yogananda was initiated by His Holiness Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, he didn't have the TM technique.
I did enjoy his promo tape. He had me at "the US Government placed him on their Watch List". he must have been doing something right. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <emptybill@...> wrote : “We were members of the SRF before starting TM in 1967 and were frequent visitors to the Mt. Washington center in L.A.. The meditation is very similar to TM practice and includes the use of a mantra called the "hong sau" as well as being aware of the sound current. It is a reliable yoga practice but I seem to be more attuned to my TM technique, probably due to the benefit of direct contact with teachers like Jerry Jarvis and MMY - which seems to have added the requisite shakti element to my program.” The “hong-sau” was Yogananda’s Bengali approximation of some ancient breath-phonemes. These are forms of mantra-pranâyama used to un-restrain (“ayama”) the breath. It is a practice found throughout the Yoga-Upanishads. However, the actual Sanskrit is “haṃsa” – pronounced in English equivalency as “hum” (as in the word humble) plus the phoneme “suh” as in the Southern reply “yes suh”. Therefore, the accurate pronunciation in Sanskrit is “humsuh”. The Bengali-English equivalent would be either “hungsuh” (not like hoong” but like “he hung himself”) or with long “ah-s” as the phoneme “hângsâh”. The phoneme“hong” is a straightforward pronunciation-equivalent. The so-called phoneme “sau” is pronounced in Sanskrit like the English word “sow” and was an unwieldy attempt by Yogananda to approximate the phoneme “sah”. When joined with the breath, the in-breath sound is "hum" and the out-breath sound is "suh". As it says in one of the Yoga-upanishad-s, when performed long enough, this pranâyama-mantra reverses and becomes the more common prana-mantra "sohaṃ" - pronounced "so" on the inbreath and "hum" on the outbreath. This is an Upanishad identity mantra: "Soham" means "He I am" (parsed as sah-aham) but joined in Sanskrit sandhi (phonemic union). ♫ Paramahânsa Yogânânda parlez-vous? ♫
