Mantra (as it should be) revisited
A song was running through my head all day today, a thread of sound sewn from the inside out, arriving at the inner ear audibly enough that I began to sing along… and so the music, which had already been part of the world, returned to it. What we take into us, changes us. What we allow into ourselves physically alters us, affects the way in which we think, the ways we feel and automatically interpret events, and therefore the ways in which we respond. Every sound takes root in the inner ear, and every smell takes root at the base of that sense. Everything we see is imprinted upon the inner eye, and is remembered in that vast – infinitely vast – record which is our conscious and subconscious mind. Everything we touch is recorded in the memory of a nerve, in the flow along an energetic channel.
The song which I played just before I slept last night continued to ring within me until we turned to the sun again, and mewling of hungry cats broke the refrain. What if that song had been one from the 70s, one that had terrorized my youth: DOA, a track from the Viet Nam war which brought into my little bedroom the horrors of maimed bodies and lives overseas? What if the music had been the raging discord of a punk band? Or the bittersweet simplicity of a You done broke my heart country riff, where the narrator is invariably powerless to own and offer his love?
The song in my head today was Dave Stringer’s Saraswati Ma. In the Hindu tradition, the Great Spirit, the One, or the Christian God, is identified as separate beings, allowing the human heart to bow to and open to specific qualities, perhaps allowing a more personal connection to the sublime. Saraswati is the goddess of learning and the arts (music), the consort of Lord Brahma, the Creator. She is also worshipped as the goddess of thoughts of truth and forgiveness. Stringer’s beautiful melody is the sweetest hymn of gratitude, to the source of his music and creativity. Because I chose his music, the threads of melody and harmony, and the intention within the music itself, became part of the fabric of my being.
It is not that mysterious – or perhaps it is the mystery beyond all mysteries. If we sit within the “prove it” paradigm of modern science, you can at least extrapolate from whatever you can perceive, and see that the electromagnetic waves created, the waves created by a sound – in this case, the complex sounds of music – move into and physically affect your body, your audition. That mechanical affect is changed into electrical affect as the stimulated sense is transmitted through the nervous system, transmitted to the cells and the currents of the brain, where neurotransmitters – the chemicals of thought – are fired and create movement within the cortex.
And that is about as much as modern science can tell you, which should be enough of a launching pad to realize that some wild stuff goes on up there, in the beautiful mix of electricity and chemistry and spirit, some wild stuff we can never approach with our blunt tools. Scanning electron microscope? A club, wielded by very recent descendants of the ape, ah ha! Particle accelerators? A bigger club, which barely swings in a straight line, and which breaks rocks into pieces, but can never touch the life of rocks. Don’t like being compared to an ape? When you allow the world to be much larger than you are, as it should be, the comparison makes you laugh as it frees you. Electron microscope? Beautiful! Really amazing! The power of human thought, it is remarkable, isn’t it?
A club.
Back to mantra. We can’t know all of the ways the external is brought into us and affects us. But when we begin to look more and more closely at ourselves, when we become more familiar with the nuances of our thought and feeling, we gain a faculty of awareness that only grows with the watching. And in watching, we start to notice more what small things do to us. This is how radio telescope (truly astounding piece of engineering! A beautiful, beautiful club.) looked further out into the universe than we ever could have done with our external eyes, and found the slightest wobble in the movement of a star. A movement we could never have seen with our eyes, had we not created a far-looker as powerful as this, a barely-perceptible wobble in the movement of a star. Which was the existence of a large, non-light-producing planet!
You knew it existed, just as you knew other life existed in this vastness we call a Universe, but were taught to believe what was proven – or disbelieve what had not been proven. The same applies to the movement and the changes within your Self. Had I listened to the Sex Pistols raging against the Queen all night long, I assure you my experience of this day would have been radically different.
What you experience takes life within your body. How vital it is, then, to draw to yourself that which brings you more health and more openness. Draw to yourself what brings you greater capacity to recognize health and love, and to resist what dismantles your being, and closes you to others.
Mantra is this choice. By recognizing that which heals us, we are able to go looking for that cure, again and again and again, we repeat our cure to the exclusion of what harms us, as the Good (the God) taken into our inner selves displaces what has caused us harm. As we choose more and more to live within the good, we occupy space within our conscious thinking and subconscious being that cannot therefore be occupied by malice, or fear, or hate or dis-ease.
If you choose to commute to work every day in traffic, the traffic works its way into you. If you choose to listen to crass talk radio, or even eloquent NPR, you will have chosen to repeat to that extent a mantra of strife and of challenge and probably of little hope. If you choose to begin your day reading the headlines, you will have greeted the sun’s return with calamity. If you choose music of anger, you will reinforce the anger which exists within you. If you choose to connect with others without intimacy – when your aching heart knows that intimacy is what it longs for – you will reinforce the isolation and sadness that you learned as you grew to adulthood.
All of these things exist. The strife and the challenges, the isolation and the anger, they all exist and we will not eradicate them from the world nor from our lives. But we choose an inner sanctum, we consciously create it by choosing heart and choosing beauty first and foremost. By practicing compassion, as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn and all the real world leaders profess. By careful choice of what heals us, and equally careful rejection of what causes us pain, we give ourselves a foundation from which we might better address the struggles of our lives, our communities, and our world.
Dave Stringer’s praise to creation is playing as I speak, in repeat, playing a life full of grace again and again and again, that repetition will make it so.