The mantram at the time of death is our focus this week, with implications immediate and profound. Last chapter Easwaran instructed us to conserve our energies and harness the power underlying our desires, to realize the indivisible unity of life. Now he elucidates how that realization can enable us to go beyond death.
“[A]s long as the mind has not been stilled through the practice of meditation and the repetition of the mantram, consciousness will remain in the mind at the moment of death. We will still be identified with the ego, and our last thought will be I, I, I. To repeat the mantram at this stage is impossible if we have only been saying it on the surface level of consciousness, for there is no surface level any longer. To be able to repeat the mantram at the actual moment of death, the mantram must have sunk very, very deep into the mind – so deep that instead of our last thought being I, I, I, the last thought will be of God, whose symbol is the mantram.”
We look forward to hearing your comments on this week’s eSatsang reading, chapter nine of The Mantram Handbook, pages 129–138.*
What is the most important thing that Easwaran said to you in this reading? How can you apply it in your life?
We have experimented with many different mantram-deepening exercises over the past few months. Briefly reflect and choose an exercise you found particularly helpful, and work on that again this week.
For our spiritual treat, let’s turn again to Easwaran’s Patanjali talks,** this time with Talk Eight. The full talk is an hour, but you can listen to part of it now and when you return the player will resume where you left off. If time is short, consider starting with just the first five minutes, in which Easwaran highlights the unanimity of the central teaching at the heart of the Buddhist path, Patanjali’s raja yoga, and the path of devotion shown to us by Jesus Christ.
* For those using electronic versions of The Mantram Handbook with different page numbering: this week we are reading all of chapter nine.
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