A lot of religions have an element of chanting in them. (Heck, I’ve belonged to a Christian denomination in the past that had a practice which they didn’t call chanting, but, basically, was a form of chanting. They called it ‘calling on the name of the lord’. FTR I did not participate.)
A friend of mine from grad school, a super sharp guy, is now a Buddhist monk in California, and one of the practices he engages in involves chanting sutras and names for the Buddha for several hours most days.
At his religious order’s website, half the advice given in their Q&A section involves chanting names of the Buddha. This is intermixed with other advice which seems to be basically morally sound and productive. So this chanting things seems to attract at least some intelligent and morally realistic and upstanding people.
So my question is basically, what’s up with this? Not in a debate sense, but in a, “what is the actual factual information about the effects of this practice?” Why do people chant? What keeps them going? What effect does it have on practitioners? Perhaps a bit more on the opinion side–why is it associated specifically with religious or otherwise-transcendency-aspiring practices?
As far as what type of evidence there is and why they work - good luck. There are some studies showing brain waves and fMRI, but how useful they are is hard to say.
Meditation - which this is a form of - is boring to most people, hard to do (well at least many people feel that they aren’t doing a good job), and more likely to attract those who believe in crystals and stuff like that. I’m generalizing here, but while there are some secular meditation practices and the like - it is hard to separate religion from meditation - for the same reason it’s probably hard to separate good choirs from religion.
More and more studies are being produced, but most of them need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Their results are often exaggerated by meditation proponents.
Positive reinforcement. Replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Gratitude is an especially potent trigger in both religion and therapy. Being happy in the moment.
Meditation is hard. Thoughts interfere. Focusing on saying something repetitive can clear the mind, just as focusing on breathing, or white noise. When you’re chanting, you can’t do anything else. It’s like a mental/spiritual/emotional shield.
Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love went to a chanting-based ashram, I found her recording of those experiences interesting, and she also goes into the brain studies DataX mentioned as well as Christian methods of chanting.
Any rhythmic repetition helps you get into a meditative, hypnotic, flow, or trance state of mind. It can be chanting, drumming, trippy dance beats, even running.
Persons delivering religious services or sermons might be speaking to a large audience or congregation. Before they days of electronically amplified sound, the speaker had to talk LOUD. This sounded awkward, as it sounded like yelling. (Today, it’s done with all-capital letters.)
Turns out, though, you can SING loud without it sounding like you’re just shouting at someone. So singing evolved as a method of choice for a speaker to deliver a message to a large audience.
According to my 7th grade General Music class, this is exactly how opera evolved, going back (in one variant or another) at least as far as the plays of the ancient Greeks that were performed in those huge outdoor amphitheaters.
I would say thy have found a cheap easy source for opiates. In some of the more extreme groups where chanting is done several times daily you can see the chanters come out visibly intoxicated.
Note that the people talking about meditation in previous posts are talking about “passive meditation”. There is another kind, called “active meditation”, in which flitting thoughts are not considered interference but actually desirable: you pick a subject, relax while thinking of it sort-of-in-the-background and see where your mind goes. The practitioners of active meditation which use chanting-style techniques do so in order to move the subject to the back-burner, to help them achieve that state of “relaxed thought” (as per several Catholic nuns, who were the ones who told us about active meditation).
I think it was Gene Wolfe (sci fi writer) in one of his books described meditation as one of the “cheap highs”. Along with the hypnotic effect there is slowed breathing; presumably constant chanting has the same effect, interfering with breathing to produce a marginal oxygen deprivation “high”. (Good time to mention auto-erotic asphyxiation as another concept involving oxygen deprivation high… but I guess not waterboarding).
People claim to be getting closer to God, instead they are just losing touch with reality and losing their critical reasoning faculties. Cheaper than a bottle of cheap booze or some recreational drugs.
The research does not support your conclusion. I don’t know if chanting per se is different from meditation, but both have been shown to cause measurable brain changes associated with positive things. And of course, these researchers have heard of placebos before.
You can breathe awfully slowly before you become hypoxic. I’ve held myself to one breath per minute before for extended periods without any problem: take 30 seconds to slowly inhale, 30 seconds to slowly exhale, repeat until bored. I don’t think slowed breathing on the part of meditators involves hypoxia.
To the OP’s question, I think religious chanting may be a route (one of many) for its practitioners to achieve mystical experience. Other people use dance,hallucinogens ('shrooms, LSD, DMT, etc.) music, and still other things.
Eric Raymond is a pretty rational fellow. He won’t cop to belief in the supernatural, but he’s quite sure there’s a whole lot more going on in our own minds than we generally experience in a typical day; mystical experiences, evoked by song/dance/chant/drugs, are a way to tap into that stuff.
Slightly OT but a lot of Catholic churches make the mistake of lighting the altar candles straightaway. They should be lit only when the congregation starts chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy…”
There’s an evolutionary fondness for this sort of thing–the same that causes us to like strong beats in music. The religious chant just takes it further because you actively participate.
You need to learn to take better care of your voice. There is no reason you should not be able to keep up any vocalizations without hurting your throat. At least, if you don’t already have a problem in your throat and aren’t sick.
Doesn’t this only apply to the “Sanctus” candle? From what I can tell, this practice is only found in the old Latin rite, and even then, it was only sporadically observed. This article from the New Liturgical Movement’s blog includes a photograph of the Elevation of the Host during a Latin mass, and you can see the Sanctus candle to the priest’s right (almost obscured by the altar server’s head)–it’s conspicuously shorter than the main altar candles.
It has been a while since I attended a mass (and personally, I’ve never seen a Sanctus candle lit at either a modern or a Latin mass)–however, unless they’ve changed things recently, mass isn’t even supposed to begin until the main altar candles have been lit, and they’re supposed to stay lit for the duration of the mass.