This week we’ll continue our reflection on the passage “Let Me Walk in Beauty”, and we’ll expand our theme of the Compassionate Universe to include the mantram.
Experiment
This week, try to find time to experience the mantram in nature. If you haven’t spent focused time with the mantram in nature before, no problem! The idea behind this exercise is to say the mantram silently with as much concentration as possible for 15 minutes, while you experience the outdoors. Keep the mantram at the forefront of your mind.
Please also feel free to take some dedicated time to repeat the mantram while taking exercise outdoors, while walking, for example.
Below, we're sharing an excerpt from Easwaran and his own reflections on nature.
For more ideas on the mantram in nature, we invite you to read Jamie’s story below. Jamie is a longtime passage meditator from Yellowknife, Canada. We look forward to hearing about your mantram in nature experiments!
This is an excerpt from Words to Live By, from Easwaran.
In the ancient Indian tradition, many timeless truths underlying life – on which the health of the world depends, and our life too – are conveyed in simple, beautiful allegories. The earth is Goddess Earth. She is a person. She is a living personality. Today we have forgotten that the earth is our mother, and that unless she is healthy, that with which she nourishes us will not make us healthy.
Air is also considered to be a great god, whom we are expected to worship by keeping it pure, because our very life depends upon it. It is incomprehensible to me how this vital necessity of ours has been ignored in our modern civilization in the frantic pursuit for material possessions, many of which are not necessary. We needn’t embrace poverty, but a beautiful life can be a simple life. Isn’t pure air more precious than anything else?
This is not a pessimistic outlook; it is a very optimistic one, because environmental problems can be solved by little people like us, working together.