The Heart of Mantra
A repeated word or phrase, spoken aloud or under one’s breath, is a mantra – the thought and sounds made again and again, until the sound itself empties of sound, and the sense becomes empty of sense. The boundaries of the word are broken, and the meaning of it, revealed deep within the sound and beneath your making of the sound, is infused into you.
Flowery words for saying, in the pragmatic language of Science, that through a repetition of sounds and thoughts, you create new neural pathways, create a physical memory in your nervous and endocrine systems, into which the body may relax: sanctuary.
The Catholic Church employs mantra (call it what you will), and of course the Buddhists do as well. But the concept and practice is not limited to religion, nor is it held only in the spoken word: repetition of any action or idea is mantra you have consciously or unconsciously adopted, and it creates the same physical trail of memory in the body and the mind.
Meditative practice is a mantra which offers a beautiful sanctuary, one that is available to you at any time of day or night, whether active or not; with a continued practice, the stillness which is actively cultivated spreads out into your day, so the effect is cumulative and extensive. The same occurs in a regular practice of yoga asana. Regular lovemaking can be a beautiful mantra, a gentle practice of blending energies; in fact, any activity repeated with some frequency or constancy will reinforce whatever is essential in it, will color the subtle body with its light. The superficial effects which you notice at first are replaced by awareness of the most subtle changes and the gift of more nuanced ways of connecting.
Choose well!
In a daily practice of yoga asana, there is great beauty – not in the results of regular physical exercise, though to inhabit a strengthening body and clearer mind is pleasurable. Rather, there are the those nuances which become apparent, the minute adjustments made as a form is seen, then seen again, now refined, now experienced anew… So in the end, any drive toward physical accomplishment – performing a handstand, for example – becomes secondary to the greater ability that is unfolding: the ability to live lightly, and observe your Self in stillness and in motion.
Just so, physical principles govern everything we encounter: all things begin in stillness, inert, as objects at rest. Wherever a person or a thing stands in the world, it is unmoving but contains energy bound within its being. When we participate in seated or vipassana meditative practice, we slow our activity as much as possible, and in so doing train ourselves as observers of ourselves and all other things. A body in stillness, having eliminated the vibrations and noise and movement within itself, detects the slightest sounds of being that are around or within.
From stillness, we choose our motions. The first lesson in school physics is understanding bodies in motion. A ball rolls across a table – here, here, here – and we identify its location in distinct moments. We string these moments together and are able to measure movement. In the practice of a mantra, an asana practice, we act. Then we act again, similarly; then again. In our lives, we have a ball rolling, and energy moving, a repeated way of being appears today, tomorrow, the next day. And in the repetition we become the movement, we give ourselves awareness of it, as we see the same practice again and again, and the world… we see the world through a constant, and gain in our knowledge of all that is outside of ourselves as well.
There is another dimension to our study, however, a higher dimension. We take our body in its potential, its stillness, and set it to walking. This morning I sat silently at breakfast. Tomorrow I sit silently at breakfast… This morning, before I left my bed and began my day, I gave gratitude for being here. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.
But if tomorrow I wake with a lover beside me? Or in thirty years awake with my old friend beside me? If yesterday my asana practice was very strong, and today my body requested recovery? The analysis of any event is made greater when we begin to string together events, see the same effort over time. In the world of physics, we look not only at velocity, the regular movement over time, but acceleration, the change in that regular movement. When we look at the complexity of our asana practice, or meditation, or loving, and we begin to see that all that is repeated in life is at the same time essentially equal, and subtly different… ah, in the subtle differences we begin to know ourselves. And when we know ourselves, we have found a door into everything.
The physicists, of course, are mystics with high-tech toys. I am not speaking about those who wear the title Physicist, but are merely engineers, trying to make better machines. No, the real Physicists, you now what they are trying to do: they are looking to devise a Unified Field Theory, a single construct, a formula that defines every interaction in the physical world. In other words, they are painting a picture of the Universal – God, Allah, Yahweh, Great Spirit – an equation at a time. They hope to break an atom down until the last little piece, the building block of all existence, has been named and traced.
But every time they get close, the thing falls apart in their hands. If you look from far enough away, that fuzzy emptiness – of which, by the way, are bodies and brains are almost entirely composed – looks solid enough. The stone was a stone until we broke it down to sand; then sand was sand; silt was silt; dust was dust, and returned to dust… until our eyes became so sharp that we saw within an atom, within the nucleus, and tried to pin down an electron, like a butterfly on a board… but it turned out not to be pinnable, hardly to exist at all. Interesting to imagine that all the stuff of existence that makes up this thing we call the body, is actually winking in and out of that existence all the time. You’re a little humming music yourself – all you need do is stop in silence and listen!
I have followed the metaphor of movement, and it has its charm (if not too obtuse for readers… but remember, this is a hot-penned blog). Physics works to build the unimaginable, the tunnel diode which was predicted on paper and produced in reality, but it relies on imaginary numbers. It builds an ethereal Pyramid of Cheops using mathematical models and scanning electron microscopes and particle accelerators…
And yet the mystic, using no tools but his or her own Self, travels the same distance – and further – in a single still moment!
Now.