Mantras and the World

I used to spend a lot of time with my ultra orthodox Jewish neighbors. One thing that stood out was the complete lack of external influence in their lives. Every book in the house was a Jewish book. If the children watched a cartoon, it was a Jewish cartoon, and not just vaguely Jewish but fully religious. They had no television. When they listened to music, it was Jewish music. They had no fiction, no mainstream stories, none of the usual cultural material that fills most homes.

Being around them made me reflect on how many influences other parents allow into their children’s minds. When you let your children watch a Disney movie, are you really comfortable with every value being instilled in them through that story? Have most people ever thought deeply about who they want their children to become, and how the modern world directly conflicts with those ideals?

And this extends far beyond children. It applies to all of us. We let ourselves become engrossed in this culture, and this culture’s values are constantly shifting. These values may conflict with our own sense of good and bad, yet they creep in anyway. The ideas of the culture take over. They possess us. We begin to believe them even when they conflict with what we thought we wanted, how we believed we should think, and how we wanted to live. These values and ideas shape who we are, whether we like it or not. So we need a more fundamental approach to this question. Who do we want to be? What do we want to be? How do we want to live? And from that standpoint, we should take in ideas and culture that match that direction.

Of course, even the idea of who we want to be is shaped by the culture that has already programmed us. A Disney movie can program a child long before they ever reflect on anything. We have seen this especially with women. Older Disney movies programmed little girls to dream of being princesses, to dream of a prince rescuing them, to imagine a happy ever after ending that revolved around a man and family. These were the values that were installed, what we now call traditional values. Today’s Disney movies program something different: female empowerment, female heroes, flipping the script by putting a girl into a role that used to belong to a boy or a man. And I am not standing here claiming one set of values is correct, but most people never even thought about any of this. We have to take a more fundamental philosophical stance on what we want our daughters to be. Will these values benefit them or harm them?

We are already seeing how this plays out in the real world. Fewer people getting married. Fewer people having children. More women in the workplace. More women in positions of power. More women with responsibilities that used to be reserved for men. But along with this comes the stress of work, the missed opportunity to have children, the difficulty of finding a loving partner. Everything has a trade off. There is no perfect solution.

We cannot change the past, but we can take a stand now and rethink what we want to be, and how we want to deal with the ideas of the world that possess us.

This brings me to the concept of a mantra. A mantra is generally a phrase or word repeated over and over by religious practitioners. The literal meaning is mind protector. The root man refers to mind, thought, or awareness. The root tra refers to protection or a safeguard. A mantra is something that protects the mind, something that shields it.

If we want to protect our minds from these outside influences, we first need to admit that we overestimate our resistance. We underestimate the power of culture and advertisements to influence us. The truth is that we are all extremely vulnerable to these forces. You can see this clearly when you compare your own beliefs to the culture you were raised in versus some so called primitive culture. Do you believe in science, in God, or in the spirits of the forest? Do you believe all humans are equal, or that one race should be prioritized? Do you identify with your nation, your village, or your religion? You can see very quickly that we are all under the influence of the ideas we grew up with.

Once we develop a clear sense of who we want to become, we can use a mantra deliberately. The mantra should relate to what you are trying to develop within yourself. Ideally it is tied to something larger, not just a phrase but an entire world of meaning. For example, a mantra that represents your religion connects you to something vast and powerful. When it is tied to a physical feeling in the body, it becomes even stronger. When you repeat a mantra connected to something enormous, like God or an ultimate truth, the feeling and the words fuse together. You begin to feel connected to something infinite.

The remarkable thing about a mantra is that once it becomes established, it repeats on its own. It continues in your mind without conscious effort. And when you stop and check what is happening inside your head, instead of the usual thoughts, advertisements, or political noise, what you find is the mantra. The mantra protects you. It shields you from that outside noise and calls you back to the direction you have chosen.

As you repeat the mantra, it gains power. It pushes out other ideas and installs itself within you. It becomes its own module. If it is set up correctly, especially following the structures used in religious traditions, the mantra gradually transforms you into the idea it represents.

One example is a Buddhist mantra I use often. The mantra is om mani padme hum. One meaning I like is "the All is a precious jewel that sits in the middle of the lotus flower which blooms in my heart." This links to the belief that I have Buddha nature, that compassion and potential already exist within me. The mantra connects this idea to a feeling in the heart. In Tibetan Buddhism, the mantra is also linked to a yidam, a deity whose appearance symbolizes compassion. The deity can be understood as something external you are trying to contact or as an aspect of who you already are. As you repeat the mantra, you link yourself to Buddha nature, to compassion, to the symbolic form of the deity, and to the vast idea of enlightenment.

With enough practice and enough connection to the mantra and everything tied to it, you start to develop the qualities of the deity. These qualities include compassion, the desire to help others, and the feeling within you that matches these qualities. And the mantra repeats quietly in the background as you walk through the world, guiding you toward the person you are choosing to become.