According to Harish Johari, India's foremost exponent of Yantra Yoga, students of Tantric Yoga who have devoted their energies exclusively to the practice of mantras (the repetition of certain sounds which lead to higher consciousness) may have been missing an important part of their training.

Johari says the sound patterns of mantra, so conducive to states of peace and awareness, are best balanced by the practice of Yantra Yoga, the yoga of visual symbols. During one of his rare visits to this country, Master Johari, who is also internationally known as a sculptor, author and poet, conducted a workshop in the Princeton, N.J. branch of SRI (Self Research Institute) Center International. On a bright winter day he took time during a painting session to talk to Yoga Journal about this important yoga, so little known outside of India.

Incense filled the upper room of the bungalow as the small, dark man in the white kurta spoke. A dozen students sat on the floor, painting mandalas (symmetrical visual images of Indian cosmographies), as the sound of a distant tamboura provided a haunting background for their practice.

"Mantra (sound) and yantra (visual symbols) are the two most basic or fundamental expressions of Tantric Yoga, which is, of course, the yoga which employs our senses to help us develop intuition," Johari said. "When we talk about the intuition, we run into a subject which is very popular with western scientists and psychologists: the two hemispheres of the human brain. To many, this is a new idea! But even in the West, there is a tradition of acknowledging that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left, which is the logical, analytic side, and the right, which is the artistic, intuitive side. Descartes said we had two brains: a thinker brain and an artistic brain.

"In India, of course, this concept stretches back many thousands of years. Shiva and Shakti, the male and female ... all the basic pairs of opposites which suggest this bipolarity of the human brain. This is the concept underlying the hermaphrodite, which is such a common symbol in Indian art. When man began using only the logical side of his brain, he relinquished the possibility of wholeness. Tantra is an important way of integrating both hemispheres of the brain once again, and Yantra Yoga plays a vital role in reawakening the intuitive insights which have been dormant because of so many years of analytical thinking."

One of the imbalances, which Master Johari sees in our culture's overemphasis on logic, is the creation of doubt. "Doubt weakens the will," he said, "and has resulted in systems of education, that perpetuate a negative view of self and the world around us.

"Where is the university which will teach us how to become men and women? We know how the Eskimos are living; we know how the people in India are poor and starving," he said with an ironic smile, "but are we taught that the left hemisphere governs rational thought and the right hemisphere controls the artistic impulses? Are we taught what it is to be human ... what time to wake, eat? No, we are taught only to go by desires. I like this, whether it is in season or not, whether it grows in this place or not. I like it. So people become more and more disoriented and wander further from their real foundations."

Master Johari believes that in all things one should work toward synchronizing the brain. "The right side processes visual patterns and can easily be stimulated by working with yantras," he observed. "The left side is verbal and responds readily to mantras. Despite what you've heard, Tantric Yoga is not something dealing with sexual practices, as has been publicized widely in the marketplaces of America and Europe! Tantra is living practice, bringing the ideals of philosophy into the realities of day-to-day life."

Active as a Yantra Yoga teacher since 1966, Master Johari urges individuals who wish to get in touch with their right hemisphere to "sit down and color yantras! Start with the Ganesh yantra first. Ganesh is the symbol with which we start everything in Tantric Yoga. It is very difficult to believe that someone with an elephant's head and a big potbelly, who looks so funny, can be a god! But what is creating that problem? Your left hemisphere! If you can get around it and start seeing beyond that -- if you can suspend your rational doubt, you are already on your way to spiritual growth. When your right hemisphere is exercised, balance comes in between the two. You get the real message: that energy is energy -- it can express itself in any form."

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