93 Mantra Meditations 1

What are mantras and how do we use them?  First, in part 1 we explore one kind of mantra meditation and its' use of mantra sounds with no meaning.  Next we look at the awakening meditation's use of mantras from the heart.  Sathya Sai Baba observed, "A pure thought from a pure heart is better than a mantra".   We explore this heart mantra in relation with the Unity Church mantra, "There is one presence and one power moving in and through us - in divine and perfect order."  We'll practice some of these mantra based meditations in the podcasts following part 2.  You pick which ones work best for you. 

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. I trust you're doing well this week. Today, let's talk about mantras and the many ways to use them in your life. One of the main ways to use a mantra, the most important way, in my opinion, is to use it to help you awaken as a tool. As Ramana used to say, let's find out who you are first before we look at how you could use mantras to awaken. Who are you? So let's talk about that a bit first. It's really what all these podcasts are based on awakening and who you are. As we've talked about before, you're like a rainbow and you experience this directly for yourself. As you clarify, every person experiences this. It's not any mystery, but as you settle down, as you clarify, as you sit still and let your thoughts wind down and all that obscures your knowing and your seeing, you start to experience yourself as a continuum. On one end of the continuum, there's the infinite, open, I'm going to call it nothing because it's beyond creation. And because it's beyond creation, it doesn't exist yet. You feel it not through your senses, but through your intuition, you experience yourself as infinite and the potential of all things. You feel very real, but you're just not in existence. As you come into existence, you experience yourself as a bright light and then a low and high pitch sound, OM, low pitch, and then a ringing sound, high pitch. And those are the two main ones. And then as you slow down, because creation is a slow moving affair, as you slow down, you experience yourself as a joy and bliss and peace and wellbeing. And these, you can feel through your senses and we might call those the quality of being your experience, your being in creation. These are not the same as emotions because they're not created. Your being is always there all the time, forever. You don't have to do anything to create any of these things, any of these qualities or your being you're always there. You're infinite. You're one with the infinite. You are the infinite. So these qualities of being such as happiness, joy, peace, wellbeing, they might seem like their emotions, but they're not. They're more like vibrations and they're truly who you are. Now, emotions are those things that we create when we are separated. For instance, when we're separated from ourselves, we have separation anxiety. We create an anxiety because we're afraid. We create an anger because we're angry that we're separated. We create a, um, a feeling of abandonment and what creates these? It's our mind. It's our mind spinning because we're separate and we're grasping. We're trying to get back to ourselves, but we don't know how. And we're reacting, hurt, fear, and anger, hurt, fear, and anger, create our personality. That's what our personality is made out of. It's a getting machine. We're trying to get back to ourselves. We're trying to get love. So we're grasping at relationships. We're trying to get safe. So we're trying to get a lot of money. We're trying to get happy again or get fulfilled. So we try to buy a lot of cars and iPhones and things like that. Thinking that any of these things could make us happy, or we drink a lot or use drugs, or we do a lot of things. We create a personality in order to get these things in order to be safe again and be happy again and so on and so forth. So that's the human predicament. We sit down and we meditate so that we can see these things and we can extract ourselves from the midst of living through our thoughts and our emotions. Our predicament is one like being born with pink sunglasses on. We don't realize we have the sunglasses on. We don't realize that the world really isn't pink. We're just used to it. Our emotions, our personality, we've developed it at such an early age and we're looking through our thoughts. Our thoughts are just lenses the same as our emotions are just lenses. They're just filters. So our pure energy of being peace, love, well-being, that shines, that light shines through these filters called thoughts and emotions and that's how we see our world. We see our pink world because our thoughts are colored. They skew our experience. So I spent probably decades in my awakening process looking through my personality and trying to solve it through my personality. How can I go to more therapy? And therapy is very helpful to release things. But how can I go to more therapy to let things go so that I can be happy and eventually awake? Or how can I be successful and so that I can relax? Or how can I get a good relationship or exercise just right or eat just right or do all these things which all are good things but they aren't awakening. And I thought they were awakening because I perceived everything with my personality as the reference point, as my reference point. There was a me that I was looking through and those are the sunglasses, the me, the personality. So what does all this have to do with mantras? We're getting there. When I'm looking through pink sunglasses, somehow I have to remove myself from them in order to see the world as not being pink. Somehow I have to extract the sunglasses from my face. I have to quit peering through them. Well, it's the same dynamic in awakening. I have to quit looking through my thoughts, through my emotions. I have to extract myself from them. How do I do that? Well, I sit still is a good way. That's called meditation. And I just watch them. When I watch them, that means I'm not looking through them. As I often say, it's quite different to look at a bottle of wine than it is to drink a bottle of wine. Quite different to look at a thought than it is to look through a thought. So by sitting still and observing my thoughts, I can let them wind down and relax and release. It's very important though, to more than simply look at thoughts, to also allow the thoughts to drink in the wellbeing of that which is looking at them, which is me. See, I'm made of peace, love, and wellbeing. Everything, the thoughts were created to grab and get. So they're grabbing outwards, trying to get more cars and iPhones to be happy. When they can drink in instead, the being of me, the awareness that is me, they can then feel and experience the wellbeing they've been trying to get through iPhones and cars and houses, and they can relax. So it's important both that I don't jump into them, but it's important also that from their vantage point, they drink in the goodness that I am. When they relax, when they drink in what they've been looking for, they relax, they let go and they melt into me. They're all made of peace, love, and wellbeing, which is the quality of my being. So they just melt back into that. Just like tensions melt back into you after a good massage, they're gone. The tension is gone. The thoughts are gone. The emotions are gone. So that's a rough idea of the awakening process. So back to mantras. Why is it so hard to extract ourselves from our thoughts? Well, they have an addictive quality. I have to think this, I have to do this. Why? Because they are not convinced that everything's okay. They still feel like they have to get, get, get. I have to get this love. I have to get this promotion. I have to get this. I have to get that. I have to get this. They're not convinced that you're enough because they haven't drunk in you enough to realize that they haven't soaked up the wellbeing. That's why it's very important for the thoughts to soak in the wellbeing of you. The problem that we have in meditation often is we're kind of in a middle ground. We haven't totally awakened, or maybe we haven't awakened at all. And we still think we're our personality, but we're dutifully watching our thoughts and watching our emotions and just taking our five, 10, 15, 20 minutes of meditation and doing it. But it's a struggle because severe emotions are releasing because in meditation, it's hard to repress them. So we're, they're releasing their energy and they're winding down, which is a good thing, but it hurts. Uh, also the emotions are screaming for me to jump into them. Think me, feel me because they're addictive. Why are they addictive? Because they truly at that moment, believe they're necessary for you to get what you want because they don't realize who you are. They don't need to get love because you are love, but they don't realize that. So it's very addictive. And although your love all the time, and your being, as we started this podcast saying is always there, full, complete radiating, beautiful energy and light, but it's crusted over and covered up by these distracting thoughts and emotions. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope and you can't see straight. So you're wanting to let these things go because they're very stressful and your life is fractured into a thousand different directions and pieces. But because they don't realize that your peace and love, they're screaming at you to drink them, to drink them in just like a bottle of wine. And often we do. And that's why in meditation, we attempt to watch the thoughts and start to extract ourselves from them, not through effort, but simply by watching them. That means we're not jumping into them and experiencing our emotions. Watching our emotions means that we're not jumping into them, but suddenly we find that we are. And five minutes has elapsed. And we have even forgot that we're meditating because we're daydreaming or thinking what we're going to get at the grocery store. And then it's like, oh, oh. And then we start meditating again, but we're pulled into our thoughts and emotions because they're very addictive. How can we stop doing that? Well, as a baby step, as a tool, training wheels on our bicycle, we can use mantras. Let me tell you some of the many ways that they can be helpful. First, let's explore a particular kind of mantra meditation. I used it for years and still from time to time, I come back to it. It's a very powerful starting meditation. And this is how it works. You sit down in a relaxed position, you close your eyes and you just breathe normally. You chant your mantra inside of you. If your mind wanders, you bring your attention back to the mantra. You do this for five minutes in the beginning and you work your way up to 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon. That's the ideal anyway. In the end, you just meditate as much as you're comfortable in meditating. Maybe it's less or maybe it's more. So what happens here? Let's look at it. You sit down, you start to meditate, and then you can't just watch the thoughts because they're so addicting. You start to jump into them. But this particular mantra meditation already has that solved with a mantra because at the first sign of a thought, a thought starts to come up. You just chant your mantra silently to yourself. Now these mantras are meaningless sounds. For instance, one might be ING, another one might be M, another one might be INGA, another one might be EMMA, on and on and on. The reason why they're meaningless sounds is that way your mind won't start to think about them. Because once you start to think about them, you're thinking, right? You have not extracted yourself from the pink sunglasses, you have now jumped into them. The topic now is mantras. Because if I had a mantra that was meaningful to me, such as I am radiance or I am peace, maybe I would start thinking about that. Maybe I would get a visualization or an image and that is me using my mind rather than observing my mind. Now what's so hard about all this meditation in the beginning is that just seems ridiculous. How can I not be my mind? What's wrong with visualizations? What's wrong with guided visualizations or things like that? Nothing's wrong with them. They're helpful on another level, by the way. But as far as awakening, they're still using your mind. They're still using your emotions. And what's so difficult in the beginning is to really comprehend that we're not our thoughts and we're not our emotions. We really are not. If they all disappeared, we would be there. But our problem is we've been so enmeshed in them, living life through them. We don't have any conception, generally speaking, of who we are. Who would we be without them? Now, what in fact does happen as we separate from our emotions and our thoughts, we're this beingness that I described earlier in the podcast. And on one end, it's quite beyond creation. So you could call it emptiness, but it's a very full emptiness. It's known through intuition. Well, at first it doesn't feel like anything. It's like when you observe your hand, there's no feeling in the observation. The part that's watching doesn't feel like anything. But that's you, the one watching. But what happens is you put your attention there and do it long enough and don't move from there. You start to glow. There's an energy that comes through that conduit of you, that quote unquote, empty beingness that turns into light and sound, and it begins to glow and radiate joy and peace and wellbeing. As I mentioned earlier, these are not emotions, they're qualities of being, and they are a radiance. They are a powerful radiance. Miracles happen through this radiance and you are that. But it's hard to believe because we're so captured by this false reality of thoughts and emotions. That's why in the Hindu scriptures, they talk about, we live in a world of Maya or delusion or even illusion. We don't see straight, we don't understand. So that's our dilemma and that's why it's so difficult. In this kind of mantra meditation, we short circuit the addiction in a sense by saying our mantra right as a thought begins to come up, right before we can drink out of that bottle of wine, we say something that keeps us looking at the wine rather than drinking it, looking at our thoughts rather than drinking it. So we say our mantra, let's just say it's one of these meaningless sounds, M, M. We say our mantra M and we let the mantra float away along with any thought that was coming up or any emotion. Maybe the emotion lasts a long time, so we gently might say M again, M again. Anytime we feel like it, we say M. Instead of jumping into this emotion, which may be going on and on, you know how emotions can be, or thinking, M. Instead of thinking about the dog across the street, I just say M. Now maybe the thoughts of the dog are there, but M, I let them both go. I don't drink, I can't drink the word M because it doesn't mean anything. And because my attention is primarily on my mantra M, I let the thought of the dog go. So I let them both go at the same time. And that keeps me from jumping into my emotions and thoughts. Now, eventually, because I'm not jumping into my thoughts and emotions, I start to experience my beingness and I start to experience my radiance and my peace and my well-being. And I start to radiate as I do my meditation, M. I'm not jumping into the thoughts, so I'm not getting distracted away from myself. So after a while, I learn about myself. And once I learn about myself and I experience myself, then my emotions and thoughts can drink in myself and they can begin to relax into me and disappear. Eventually, I don't even have to say my mantras anymore because I'm not being distracted by this addiction. I'm no longer addicted to my thoughts and my emotions, and I can just watch them, be with them and let them drink in the qualities of my being and relax away. So that's the first use of a mantra. So let's look at another use of mantras. I remember I was traveling in India and I wanted to see the guru Satya Sai Baba. He's very powerful, very well known, and had been around for a long time. He could do miracles and very powerful. He passed away maybe 10 years ago. So I went up to Puttaparthi in India and I stayed at his ashram. I would see him twice a day. I'd get up at three in the morning and see him in the morning and I would see him in the afternoon. And indeed he was very, very powerful. Well, Sri Satya Sai Baba said about mantras, he said a pure thought from a pure heart is better than a mantra. What does he mean by that? Well, as we're going to see later on, there are so many uses of mantras. The vibrations of these sounds can be quite powerful. They can manifest things. They can help clear out things within you. They can help you focus. They can do so many things. And we're going to touch on a number of these things, not in this podcast, but the next one, part two. But what I'd like to focus on here is in the manifestation of things, what's more powerful than simply sitting within your center as the infinite, as the one, because you know, in oneness, there are only is one that divine energy that flows through you, the radiance and beyond, beyond this existence that I described earlier, that comes from the one. It is the one shining through your incarnation and every other incarnation. It's extremely pure because it is purity itself. The qualities of your being are the qualities of the oneness. So this is what we're trying to get to in awakening. We're trying to get to ourselves. It's called self-realization, right? That's what we're attempting to do. It's kind of laughable in a sense, because we're trying to get to what we already are. We've just tied ourselves in a, to a bit of a knot or into a pretzel. And we're trying to undo our pretzel and see clearly take off those pink sunglasses. So such a Sai Baba, a pure thought from a pure heart is better than a mantra. My friend and guru, former guru Bhagavan used to say something along those lines. He said, if he pictured something, it would come into being simply by him shining his energy through that thought form, that picture, he would do a miracle now because he was one with, or is one with the universe. He would say another, another interesting thing. He said, if that picture wouldn't stay in his mind, he knew it would not happen because there is no individual. It's the divine or the infinite working through his incarnation. That incarnation can't simply picture something that is not in divine order, in divine harmony. As many of you know, at one time I was a board president of a unity church and I love the unity mantra that says there is one presence and one power moving in and through us in divine and perfect order. Isn't that pretty much what Sai Baba is saying, but in a little bit different words, this one presence, there's only one. It's very pure. It is purity itself. It's not very pure. It is pure and it's moving in and through us. And in that purity, everything is in divine and perfect order. And that's why Bhagavan through his incarnation could only manifest those things that were in divine and perfect order. If the image wouldn't stay in his mind, it wasn't in perfect order for what the universe or what his world needed at that moment. Even if one part of his personality thought it would be helpful, the universe knew that it wasn't helpful. So he wasn't able to do that, to hold a discordant or contrary image and have that manifest because he himself was one. So what does all this have to do with your awakening and mantras? Well, as you're meditating or as you're going through your day, as you become in touch with yourself, your pure self, perhaps even if you have a lot of troubles going on, on some level, you're in touch with your pure self and you can feel peace on some level or happiness on some level, even though you have troubles going on. Remember troubles are what you see through your thoughts when you look through your thoughts or when you experience through your emotions. But actually in deep trust, just as the unity mantra says, everything is in divine and perfect order. So there are no problems. I know that sounds so crazy, especially if you're in the middle of one. The difference is an awakening. You are everything and everything begins to smooth out around your energy and even the so-called problems. When you're looking from a clear place without your pink sunglasses on, when you seek from a clear place, everything you see is clear. You see clearly and you see everything is made of peace, love, and wellbeing. And it's there for the highest good. And that's what you experience in your life. Even if it's an apparent quote unquote problem. So as you're in contact, when you're experiencing peace on a deep level, even though there's problems in your life, rather than to get sucked into your problems, you can chant a mantra peace. Now this isn't the same as a meaningful phrase that might get your mind activated because it's not coming from the mind. It's coming from the quality of your being. You're actually experiencing your being, which is peace. So from that experience, you're just putting it into a word and you're saying what you are experiencing peace. Now, as you say that mantra peace, just like in TM meditation, you're not tempted to jump into the middle of that problem, which is on the external world. And by external world, I even mean your thoughts and your emotions, as well as the stuff going on out in the world. So you say peace, or maybe one part of you, your being your quality of being you're experiencing as crazy as it sounds, you're experiencing happiness, even though there's the thing, these things going on around you that do not look happy. So rather than to jump into them and get unhappy, because now you're wearing pink, unhappy sunglasses. Rather than do that, you just chant what your being is, which is happiness. And you say to yourself, happiness. And just like the TM meditation, you let everything on the outside go, you deal with it, but you let the propensity of you getting involved in the problems and the harshness of it all. You let that go. And you remain in peace, or you remain in happiness, or you remain in joy, whatever you can experience in your being, because remember, your being is there all the time. You're all the time happy and peaceful and feeling well being. The reason why that doesn't seem accurate at times is because we've covered up our nature, our being with crusty emotions and thoughts, pink sunglasses, so we don't experience our selves fully. That's the point of awakening, right? That because we've had enough pain, we don't want to do that anymore. We want to experience ourselves vibrantly, fully, and our qualities of life from our heart, rather than from trying to grab a lot of iPhones to make us happy or get a lot of houses. We want to just experience ourselves as happiness itself, right? So that's what Sai Baba was getting at. Perhaps you can create a pure mantra from the depths of your heart. And that's more powerful than a manufactured mantra. However, starting out, I might try the mantra meditation we discussed earlier and simply pick your own mantra and go with it until you get a little bit extracted from your thoughts and emotions so that you can experience your being more fully. And then once your experience, you're being more fully, you do experience a little piece. There's a little breakthrough in the crust and you feel that that immense piece, maybe a little ray of it shining through that you can continue on as, and also express in a word as a mantra or a vibration called a word. Words are just sounds, right? So these are two powerful uses of mantras. Just make up a meaningless sound for your own mantra. And the second use of mantras is using a mantra that comes from your heart, from your purity, and using that to stay connected with yourself as you watch your emotions and thoughts so that they can unwind and relax, drink in the qualities of your being and disappear. Your being itself is your mantra. So it's always with you. And the more you use that kind of mantra, the more you are by necessity centered in your being and that radiance, that light breaks through more and more crust. And after a time, that's all you are. And you, there's no need for a mantra because you are simply experiencing happiness. You don't have to say the word happiness and you're not getting sucked into thoughts and emotions. That's the only reason you would use the word happiness at first. But after a while, you're so centered in yourself, that is such your way of being that you just don't get sucked into thoughts and emotions. You watch them, you let them do their thing, unwind, drink in the qualities of your being, relax and go. Thoughts and emotions become useful tools that you utilize rather than a whole world that you're captured in and full of daydreams and lost and your thoughts and the dramas and so on. Somebody asked me once, what is awakening? And I said, awakening is you without your problems. Your problems are the pink sunglasses. When you look through your sunglasses, it separates you from your being. You're trying to decipher the world. As we talked about in the beginning of this podcast, through what you don't have, because you think you're separate from yourself. So you start trying to get stuff and you start to see what you don't have. But in fact, you really do have it all. You're not separate from yourself. And awakening is reversing that delusion of separation so that you can relax and know that it's okay. You're fine. Everything always was okay. You just had a momentary nightmare, more or less separating from yourself. Okay. In our next podcast, we'll talk more about other uses of mantras. Look forward to seeing you then. Take care. Bye.