What is a Mantra?

What is a Mantra?

The question is meaningless until you ask, "What is the brain", not "a blob of noodle-like cholesterol", or "a thinking machine; that is unless you then ask, "What is thinking?"

This blob is not necessary to connect to reality.  Its purpose is to limit reality into bites.

 

Mantra is spontaneous and reflects what we worship, or attend to,
the mantra above aims to expand the local self.  Since that is a contradiction
it is not true...the local self cannot create anything, so what creates?

 A mantra is a response to the brain; as a lawnmower is an artifact of some cultural attitude toward grass and lawns, so a mantra is a technology devised to manage aspects of the mind.  If the mantra is examined, the brain can be understood.  What is a nervous system? or "Why" is a nervous system.  Think about it. Why, in the scheme of inert gases supposedly clumping and forming elements and a gazillion reactions later, amino acids, etc...why would elements "think", or as John Dobson puts it "chew gum and walk around."  A nervous system is what Deepak Chopra calls a "transducer"; it takes an electro magnetic field, and translates it into abstract meanings. Something like thought must create or maintain a pattern that turns into a vehicle for the thought.  There is no precedent of grosser levels of organization developing randomly into subtler levels of organization.  It is as though the unlimited mind finds itself in a deep well, the stones and dimensions being self-created and relies on news from the mouth of the well, a small opening so far above, for contact with the outside world.

 

A fractal pattern of meaning and control shows itself.  They seem co-dependent: the meaning of something is found in its achievement of freedom from the control of something; and the controller cannot be a master unless the controlled participates by pretending to be controlled. Take birth as an example.  A zygote begins really as a controller, its presence in the womb animates a support system that determines all kind of chemical and hormonal realities in the body.  One aspect of that is the limit to the process itself, so the embryo has to "escape" from a convulsing womb. Symbolically, and as described by Stanislov Grof in his Holonomic theories, the newborn looks back at its "conquest" of the uterus, the consuming environment.   

 

The brain, the interpreter, is also the rigid gusset to rein in the non local nervous system.  In other words, we reach into each other and everything limitlessly, like water flowing in water, or the mycelium fungal networks infusing the soil, such that the soil seems alive, or the fungus seems like soil. "It is all one thing" and I am privy to that, simply because my nervous system dips into the life stream and reports on the whole thing all at once. The brain is a corset, a restrictor of consciousness. Mantra undoes the brain, loosens the girdle, and allows contact with reality.  Paradoxically it does it through discipline.  Now there are 2 disciplines:  the corset of the brain that reduces thought into an electromagnetic stream, and the discipline of loosening that corset. 2 "modalities", 2 very different goals.

There is a mantra in the Ashtanga yoga tradition of Pattabais Jois spoken to the guru Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras and the delineator of Yoga. (So he is probably not one person, and his name interpreted as "fallen prayer", it also could mean "serpent prayer" makes him sound more like an antidote than a personality.

 "vande gurunam charanarvinde sandarsita svwatma sukhavabodhe, Nihshreyase jangalikayamane, samsara haalahala moha shantyai //Abahu purushakaram, shankachakrasi dharinam sahasra shirasam svetam pranamami Patanjalim."

Vishnu rests on sesha, the serpent, as the brain rests on the neural network.
The local self can only reign supreme when it recognizes it can do nothing
without Big Mind tapped by the neural net, the brain does nothing but
label the experience.

Roughly it means," I bow to the gurus feet which lead to the sublime self through their presence. They lead out of delusion, as by the treatment of the skilled jungle physician (the one who knows the whole thing, the good the bad...). From the shoulders down, he has the form of Visnu, a human form wielding weapons of mace, discus.  He has a thousand radiant serpent heads above the shoulders, I bow to this form." The 1000 radiant heads are our own neural net, reaching outward without limit. The form of a human body is the vehicle that unrestricted consciousness grows out of. The 4 armed form of Visnu is "the rub"; it is the mediator between the so called local body and the non-local consciousness.  It can act as a restricting lawgiver, a punisher, a giver of boons, and it can sleep.  In any of these cases, it is there as part of the picture and has to be appreciated, understood, and dealt with. Mantra is the language of this 4 armed form that gives or takes freedom. The brain always does mantra which is a form of worship or obeisance; ruminating, repetition, fixating, is the natural state of the brain.  It becomes what is worshipped.  Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, "Who worships the gods goes to the gods, who worships me comes to me." The "undisciplined brain" seems to lack focus, but it is intently focused on its own whimsy, driven by an interplay of drives, memories, fantasies, and biology.  It is like focusing on the objects that a juggler tosses in the air, shifting from one to another, seemingly chaotic, but in fact a definite choice: to watch the objects. The "disciplined brain" does the same thing, but pays attention to the juggler and not the objects. One is no more difficult than another, and both the disciplined and undisciplined witness see everything, the ground, the objects, the juggler and their own attention.

The point is made in various places, focus to the exclusion of all else, hold the focus, and merge into the object, eliminate peripheral objects, and hold exclusively to intention.  The difficulty is there, in making intention important enough to focus on.  It requires some self-respect, dignity, to value "mu own intention" as "worthy of worship".  From childhood we are asked, begged, threatened and bribed to forego our own intent in favor of an external agency. 

Mantra is natural and continuous; self-respect is innate, the foundation for growth and claiming space.  The problem is the mediator; what god is attended to, what form is worshipped?  Mantra will spontaneously express the relationship.