Durga Mata recounts why we hear slightly different versions of the Cosmic Chants from Yogananda’s disciples: “Sometimes after he made a new chant, he would not chant the old ones for a long time and then, when he did, he would start in a different place and use different words in places, for he had forgotten them. So, we would chant louder, so he would pick up the right note or word, and the next time around he would sing it as he used to have it before. Towards the end of his life, he used to chant with the younger generation and we older ones were busy with our respective duties, and we were not able to help him remember the right notes or words. That is the reason so many chant differently.”
At the end of a video we can hear Yogananda chanting “I Am Om” and “O God Beautiful”: the tunes, in fact, which he sings are quite different from the standard ones. So again we see that he sang his own Cosmic Chants with varying words and notes.
In fact for “God of Beauty”, in the 1938 Cosmic Chants-book we learn the melody, but then it adds: “Also played…”, and offers an alternative melody.
In short, Yogananda sang his own songs in varying ways. Below (see “After the Master’s Passing“) we will look at how the standardized versions of the Cosmic Chants were finally established.
Swami Kriyananda, like Durga Mata, very significantly received a harmonium as a gift from Yogananda, which he used for many of his recordings. He too explains that the Master would sing his Cosmic Chants in slightly different ways, following his inner feeling of the moment: “Master would hold a single note for a long time, sometimes, when chanting with only two or three of us.”
For Yogananda, the most important element during chanting was of course an authentic feeling of ardent devotion. Swami Kriyananda recounts: “I remember Master, during the chanting at one Christmas meditation, encouraging us, ‘Whip up feeling in your hearts!’”