Happy New Year eSatsang friends and families! Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Mantram Relay for Peace on January 1, created by one of our eSatsang members. It was wonderful to see all 24 hours filled up – sometimes with five of us repeating the mantram at any one time. Such an inspiration!
To build on the momentum from the Mantram Relay, we invite you to make January Mantram Month. Each week, we’ll have a new practical mantram exercise including guidance from Easwaran. Join us in solidifying a new year’s resolution, or for more mantram repetition as a resolution in itself. Here’s this week’s mantram exercise:
Select someone, or something for whom you’d like to write the mantram. Many of us write the mantram for people in need, or for issues we’d like to help with but aren’t sure how. If you haven’t written the mantram before, simply write the person or topic at the top of a piece of paper (or in a mantram journal), and then concentrate on writing your mantram, over and over again. Try it out as an experiment.
Decide on a specific time for writing the mantram during this next week. If it would help you to remember, add it to your calendar and set a reminder.
In the comments below we welcome you to share your mantram writing time and chosen mantram recipient or topic. We’d also love to hear any insights or positive outcomes you experienced from this exercise.
Here’s some inspiration on using the mantram – an excerpt from The Mantram Handbook by Easwaran.
All the great religions have produced powerful spiritual formulas which are the highest symbol of the supreme reality we call God. In the Catholic tradition, and many other traditions in both East and West, such a formula is called a holy name; in Hinduism and Buddhism, it is called a mantram. The holy name stands for that supreme power of which Saint John asserts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A very simple and devoted man of God, Swami Ramdas, whom my wife and I had the blessing of meeting in India, tells us very much the same thing when he says, “The Name is God.”
The mental repetition of the holy name is one of the simplest and most effective ways of practicing the presence of God, to use the phrase of the seventeenth-century French mystic, Brother Lawrence. It is absolutely practical, and it can appeal to our common sense. When we repeat the mantram, we are not hypnotizing ourselves, or woolgathering, or turning our backs on the world. Repetition of the mantram is a dynamic discipline by which we gain access to our inner reserves of strength and peace of mind. With the mantram we regain our natural energy, confidence, and control, so that we can transform everything negative in us and make our greatest possible contribution to the welfare of those around us.
The mantram is the living symbol of the profoundest reality that the human being can conceive of, the highest power that we can respond to and love. When we repeat the mantram in our mind, we are reminding ourselves of this supreme reality enshrined in our hearts. It is only natural that the more we repeat the mantram, the deeper it will sink into our consciousness. As it goes deeper, it will strengthen our will, heal the old divisions in our consciousness that now cause us conflict and turmoil, and give us access to deeper resources of strength, patience, and love, to work for the benefit of all.
“The mantram becomes one’s staff of life,” declares Mahatma Gandhi, “and carries one through every ordeal.”
So, my advice is simple and direct: when you are faced with an overwhelming challenge or simply a difficult situation, repeat Rama, Rama, Rama, or whatever other mantram you have chosen. Just try it and see.
…
When we have unified our consciousness through these powerful disciplines, not only do meditation and the mantram come together, but all mantrams come together too. Whether our mantram is Rama, Rama or Jesus, Jesus or Hail Mary or Om mani padme hum, it fills us with the same joy and security, and it reverberates in the depths of our consciousness with the same beauty. There is a beautiful hymn in Sanskrit called The Thousand Names of the Lord, meant to inspire us with a thousand divine attributes of the supreme reality we call God. Many of these names are used as mantrams in the Hindu tradition, but great mystics like Gandhi have proved in their lives that all these thousand holy names are contained in the single name Rama, as mentioned in the scriptures. This is to tell us that once the mantram has become an integral part of our consciousness, all mantrams are the same. Whatever holy name we use, at this stage it is the perfect embodiment of the Lord of Love.
The holy name reverberating in the depths of consciousness transfigures our entire vision of life. Just as the mantram transforms negative forces in consciousness into constructive power, so it now transforms all our perceptions of the everyday world into unbroken awareness of the unity of life. When I go for a walk on the beach my ear hears the waves crashing and booming against the shore, but my mind hears them as Rama, Rama, Rama. This is not something I try to do; it’s simply how I hear it now. And when I hear the birds singing, their song too becomes Rama, Rama, Rama – with different accents, with different harmonies, but the final perception is the holy name. It is the same with the breeze, with music, with everything. As Swami Ramdas says, the name is God, not a symbol but reality; and when we are established in the mantram, established in awareness of God, everything is full of Rama – full of joy.