“[T]he key to intentional living is in gaining mastery over the mind,” Easwaran advises at the start of chapter 8 of The Mantram Handbook. And yet:
“Most of the time, the vast majority of us live on the surface level of consciousness, not suspecting the storms that rage in our unconscious. We get some hint of the tremendous power of these storms when they break through to the surface in the form of fear, anger, and greed. When these get out of control, they can pick us up and hurl us about as they like, exactly as if some force takes us over and makes us do things, say things, that we would not ordinarily do.”
It is a fearsome reality. Yet, once again, “[h]ere is where the mantram is an invaluable ally.”
“It can harness all this destructive power that is going to waste and transform it: fear into fearlessness, anger into compassion, and greed into the desire to be of service to those around us.”
We look forward to hearing your comments on this week’s eSatsang reading, pages 109–113.
Chapter seven of The Mantram Handbook has focused on excitement and depression, and as it ends, Easwaran makes a fascinating connection to spontaneity. The very same qualities that lead to the pendulum swings of excitement and depression – a racing mind, compelled by likes and dislikes – make spontaneous living impossible. Surprisingly, “[t]he secret of spontaneity is training; this is how we undo our conditioning.”
Happily, all the training we’ve been doing is taking us toward the goal:
“Any effort we make to keep the mind steady helps on all fronts. … Even if we do nothing more than try to keep the mind steady during the ups and downs of the day, we are deepening our awareness of life far more than we know.”
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 105–108 in The Mantram Handbook.
In this week’s reading, pages 100–104 from The Mantram Handbook, Easwaran starts by distinguishing between clinical depression, which may need the help of an experienced physician, and what he calls “garden-variety lows.” He lays out a systematic strategy for when we find ourselves feeling mildly depressed.. For his third tactic, he writes: “Another bit of advice for coping with depression is simple, difficult, and extremely powerful: always act as if you were not depressed. … Before you know it, you will find that you are not pretending to be cheerful any longer; you really are cheerful, because you have forgotten yourself.”
The description “simple, difficult, and extremely powerful” applies well to the skills we have been practicing in our book study.
Last week Easwaran showed us how a racing mind underlies both excitement and depression. This week he continues exposing the mental dynamics behind those states and leads us to a solution: “[U]nder no circumstances should you let praise or blame throw you into agitation. This is where the mantram comes to your rescue.”
As this skill develops, the wild pendulum swings of the mind will be dampened, consolidating our joy, and enabling access to discernment.
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 97–100 in The Mantram Handbook.
Easwaran begins chapter seven of The Mantram Handbook, titled “Excitement & Depression,” by explaining the mental dynamics behind those states, tracing them both to a racing mind. And he advises that to avoid feeling depression, “[w]e need to learn to keep our mind on an even keel.”
“Our culture places such a premium on excitement that this advice is most unwelcome. ‘Don’t let yourself get excited’ has an unpleasant, puritanical ring. But that is simply because we believe the only alternative to excitement is a flat, monotonous life. In fact, there is a third state which is neither excitement nor depression, but far, far above both: a quiet sense of abiding joy which is our real nature.”
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 93–97, and as usual we look forward to your comments.
To close our current chapter on overcoming likes and dislikes, Easwaran emphasizes a fascinating connection with freedom in personal relationships. In our modern age of loneliness, he writes, “Being able to go beyond your own likes and dislikes helps immensely in restoring the personal relationships that make life worth living, for it enables us to be patient, cheerful, and loving with those around us.”
Again the mantram can come to our rescue: “If we can repeat the mantram when we find ourselves falling into competitiveness and invidious comparison, it will help greatly to keep our minds calm and our relationships secure.”
Our reading this week is pages 87–91 as we finish chapter 6 of The Mantram Handbook.
“My grandmother sometimes used to ask me to do something important, but I had so many unimportant things of my own to attend to that the task she had entrusted to me didn’t always get done,” Easwaran relates in this week’s reading, pages 83–87 of The Mantram Handbook:
“When she would ask, ‘When are you going to do it?’ I would answer, ‘One of these days, Granny.’ She wasn’t impressed. ‘One of these days is none of these days.’ When you hear someone say, ‘I’m going to get around to it one of these days,’ you can be sure that it isn’t going to get done. The mark of the mature person is the capacity to take up a job immediately – ‘forthwith,’ as Jesus says – and do it cheerfully and with concentration.”
We can all relate to the tendency to postpone jobs we dislike, and we are eager to hear how you apply these tips from Easwaran and his granny in your own unique context.
Last week we began chapter 6 of The Mantram Handbook, where Easwaran focuses on the connection between the mantram and overcoming likes and dislikes. His theme in our reading this week, from page 78 to the top of 83, is closely related: overcoming rigidity. To illustrate this marvelous ability, he shares a favorite story – his granny’s response when his village doctor put him on a salt-free diet for a year:
“[A]s I sat down dejectedly to my first saltless breakfast, my grandmother seated herself by my side and said quietly, ‘I have gone off salt for a year too.’ And she didn’t merely tolerate that saltless food; she ate it with real gusto, because she knew that her example was supporting me. As for me, I don’t think I ever tasted a better meal than that saltless breakfast my grandmother shared with me.”
By repeating the mantram and learning to exercise our will, we can be like Granny and cultivate the mastery over our thinking process that will allow us to support those around us through any ordeal.
We are reading The Mantram Handbook, this week from pages 75–78, as we continue making progress in our eSatsang’s second-ever full-length book study. Here Easwaran advises that when we are caught in elation or depression, it is not enough just to remember the mantram, although this helps greatly. “You must also be able to strengthen your will,” he explains, “and train it to help you make the wise choices which in the long run will free the mind from these vacillations.”
We can learn to go beyond our likes and dislikes, Easwaran assures us, through repetition of the mantram and exercising the will.
Stilling the mind, Easwaran explains in this week’s reading, “means bringing every mental process under our complete control – not just on the conscious level, but in the unconscious too.” And we can achieve this formidable feat gradually by taking advantage of all the opportunities for repeating the mantram.
The results are stupendous: “Mahatma Gandhi assures us that we can come to have such effortless mastery over our mind that even in our dreams a selfish thought will not arise. This is what stilling the mind means: laying to rest permanently every negative and selfish force in consciousness.”
This week let’s read from page 72 to the end of page 74 in The Mantram Handbook, and continue working to still our minds.
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 69–72 of The Mantram Handbook. Here Easwaran begins describing the nature of the mind using the metaphor of the sea:
“Below the surface level of consciousness, what storms rage! Here are our deep-seated fears and hostilities, our cravings and conflicts. These are the deep divisions in our consciousness which make it difficult for us to concentrate, difficult to be loyal and steadfast. Often these divisions are at the root of serious physical ailments. They come to us in our sleep as nightmares, and all too often they plunge us into depression. Such storms sap our will and our vitality.”
The mantram, Easwaran explains, is that which enables us to cross the sea of the mind. With this tremendous support, he assures us, we can control the mind and access the immense reserves of will, loyalty, patience, compassion, and love we have deep within us.
Using the mantram while going to sleep is one of the topics covered this week as we read pages 60–67 of Easwaran’s The Mantram Handbook. Easwaran makes clear that the opportunity here is large: “It takes some time and some effort to master this, but once you are able to fall asleep in the mantram, it will go on working its healing effect in your consciousness throughout the night.”
And Easwaran ends the chapter with a simple reminder of what we are doing when we repeat the mantram: calling on God. “This prayer is not addressed to anyone or any power outside us, but to our deepest Self, the Lord of Love, who dwells in the hearts of us all. When we repeat the mantram, we are not asking for anything in particular, like good health or solutions to our problems or richer personal relationships. We are simply asking to get closer to the source of all strength and all joy and all love.”
“You don’t have to have set times to repeat the mantram; you can repeat it whenever you get a chance. When you begin to look for opportunities to say the mantram, you find them everywhere.”
Easwaran’s chapter on making the mantram a part of your day offers myriad practical tips. And it’s brimming with reminders of the mantram’s benefits, too: relieving tension, comforting our distress, releasing our natural curative forces, saving energy, and curing boredom, to name just a few.
We began last week with the first page of this chapter four of The Mantram Handbook. Now let’s continue by reading from page 54 to the middle of 60. We are eager to hear which tips inspire you to action!
We are making steady progress in our book study of Easwaran’s Mantram Handbook. This week let’s read from page 49 to the middle of 54. Here Easwaran helps us approach an understanding of the impersonal ultimate reality, and the syllable Om, “The perfect symbol of the impersonal aspect of the Godhead.”
Yet he emphasizes, “What most of us need and want is a personal incarnation: a figure whom we can visualize, whom we can hear stories about, whom we can love and try to model ourselves after…. Such mantrams help us to cultivate an ever-deepening devotion, and can assist us in becoming united with the divine presence in the depths of our consciousness.”
“In the annals of Islamic mysticism we find a precise exposition of the power of the holy name to transform us,” Easwaran recounts in this week’s eSatsang reading:
“All the hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets were sent to preach one word. They bade the people say Allah and devote themselves to him. Those who heard this word by the ear alone let it go out by the other ear; but those who heard it with their souls imprinted it on their souls and repeated it until it penetrated their hearts and souls, and their whole being became this word. They were made independent of the pronunciation of the word; they were released from the sound of the letters. Having understood the spiritual meaning of this word, they became so absorbed in it that they were no more conscious of their separate selves.”
Easwaran presents mantrams from Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism in this week’s reading, from page 45 to the top of 49 in The Mantram Handbook, and he assures each of us that we too can attain this absorption in the mantram.
We are working our way through chapter three of The Mantram Handbook, where Easwaran describes mantrams from great spiritual traditions around the world. In this week’s reading, from page 39 to the top of 45, he presents mantrams from the Hindu tradition along with context in which to understand them.
“‘The rule of Rama’ is a phrase that Gandhi took from the Hindu scriptures, and it refers to a kingdom in which the love we have for one another is never diminished, a kingdom ruled by justice, not violence. When we repeat the mantram Rama, Rama, Rama, we are asking that this kingdom of heaven be established here on earth. When we use the Rama mantram, we are not calling on the Rama whose story is told in legend but the Rama who lives within us as our truest Self, here and now.”
And Easwaran makes clear that the same is true for each of the mantrams he recommends. Throughout this book study, may we deepen our practice of the mantram together and move closer to the rule of Rama.
We are on to chapter three of Easwaran’s The Mantram Handbook, in which he describes mantrams from great spiritual traditions around the world. “In each tradition we have a different holy name, a different mantram,” he relates, “but all are equally valid.” Here’s an anecdote he shares to color this message:
“Many different languages are spoken in India, and in train stations travelers will hear water venders calling out vellam in my old state of Kerala, tanni in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, nilu further north in Andhra, and pani in Hindi-speaking areas. Since I come from Kerala, I respond to vellam: to me, it sounds the most like water of all these words. But to you who speak English, ‘water’ sounds just right. Whatever the name, it is the same water; it is equally refreshing by any name, and it quenches our thirst just as well.”
This week’s reading is from page 33 to the middle of 39, where Easwaran begins with mantrams from the Christian tradition.
Easwaran sounds several cautions in this week’s reading from The Mantram Handbook, pages 27–32, for example advising us not to make up our own mantram or to change mantrams, and not to feel disappointed if the mantram’s effects are not immediate.
And as usual he offers consolations, too:
“This is the realization each of us will have if we repeat the mantram faithfully: God has to respond to our earnest call, and he will respond in the way that is best for us. This is the testimony of all the great men and women of God in all the world’s spiritual traditions.”
Let’s continue working together with our mantrams and building faith that God will respond to our call.
Last week in our new Mantram Handbook book study, Easwaran put before us the lofty goal of establishing the mantram in our consciousness with the result that “you are delivered from the turmoil of the mind.”
This week let’s continue by reading pages 22–27 where he sets to work detailing the path to that goal, beginning with choosing a mantram. The approach to which he responds, Easwaran explains, “is one which the Buddha would call ‘the way of the open hand.’ The spiritual teacher says, ‘I don’t have a closed fist; my hand is open. Everything I know that can help you cross the sea of life is yours for the asking.’”
We are working together as a satsang community to make the most of this great gift.
Last week we began our book study of The Mantram Handbook. Systematically reading a whole volume from Easwaran is a great habit, and we’re pleased to be practicing it together.
This week let’s read from page 18 to the top of page 22, where Easwaran illustrates the power of the mantram using his personal experience with it. He writes, “Many years ago, after I took to meditation, I started treasuring every moment that I could repeat the mantram.” What a desirable state of affairs!
He describes how his whole frame of reference changed, and all his worldly success ceased to satisfy. “The ground shifted under my feet, and I turned inward,” Easwaran relates. “It was then that I began to repeat the mantram in earnest, using it everywhere during the day and at night.”
Together, let’s take another step this week to follow our teacher’s vivid example and kindle this earnest desire to repeat the mantram so long and so often that it will become established in our consciousness.
