Why Mantras Work and How They Help

A true mantra is “charged,” alive, because it has been handed down for centuries, and it has been handed down because it is alive.

A certain archetypal energy might result from ages of use: the passion, intensity, and will of millennia of Yogis might in itself create a subtle energy connected with the mantra. Perhaps all that subtle power gets enfolded in the name and unfolds for us in our practice. At any rate, true mantras are of consciousness, not of surface thought and semantic fabrications.

The mantra is universal, not sectarian. The author closes his lectures and workshops with five minutes of Om Namah Shivaya chanting followed by a five-minute silent meditation on it. Conservative “Calvinist” audiences, Roman Catholics, urban-sophisticate agnostics, all are moved by the mantra.

The power of the mantra is said to be the actual power of the creative process itself. Learn more:

When our will has the ability to say yes to the mantra, we align with its power. Our brain is brought into resonance; it goes into balance between inner power and outer expression, and processes data without interpretation or value – which means it operates free of samskaras. Then outer stimuli feed directly into the power of consciousness and the creative circuitry of mind/brain can operate as a unit. Since consciousness is powering the outer world by projection through the brain anyway, the balanced brain simply allows for a balanced picture to form.

When our brain is brought to balance by the mantra we are again at the center of the system, as designed. We have become ego-centric again. We have become again as a little child. The mantra is matrix.

We are then aligned with our Self, a person and world in balance. We are a unified whole which can’t, because of its very nature, divide against itself.

Read more: Spirit, Inspiration

Adapted from Spiritual Initiation and the Breakthrough of Consciousness, by Joseph Chilton Pearce (Park Street Press, 2003). Copyright (c) 2003 by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Reprinted by permission of Lantern Books.
Adapted from Spiritual Initiation and the Breakthrough of Consciousness, by Joseph Chilton Pearce (Park Street Press, 2003).