Thanks to all who joined in this year’s Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings, including last Sunday’s culmination! Taking part in that five-week program with you was a joyful and inspiring experience. Let us each continue our united effort to infuse the spiritual renaissance with a little more life, a little more love. We have Easwaran’s support in this. Our daily meditation and our mantram are healing forces in the world.
Our shared study here in the eSatsang each week supports this effort as well. Now we are ready to dive into our book study of Easwaran’s Mantram Handbook. This week we’ll start on page 11 and read to the top of page 18.* In his preface, Easwaran outlines some of the essentials:
“The mantram is a short, powerful spiritual formula for the highest power that we can conceive of – whether we call it God, or the ultimate reality, or the Self within. Whatever name we use, with the mantram we are calling up what is best and deepest in ourselves. The mantram has appeared in every major spiritual tradition, West and East, because it fills a deep, universal need in the human heart.”
“But,” Easwaran ends the preface, “nothing I can tell you will have as much meaning as using the mantram for yourself. If you use it, you will know its power.”
We are supporting each other to deepen our mantram practice and know this power together, and we believe the potential effect on our satsang and our communities is tremendous.
Is there a particular situation that causes you to get speeded up or agitated? What tips does Easwaran offer in this reading that you could try out in this situation? Even if the tips don’t seem to directly apply, try them anyhow and tell us what you find.
As we start in on The Mantram Handbook, let’s return to our exercises for extending our practice of the mantram. This week, on your regular mantram walk, try repeating the mantram very softly (in the mind) as if whispering.
If you don’t yet have the book The Mantram Handbook available, make sure you get it so you can join for the rest of the book study. We offer a 20% discount on books sold through our distribution partner indiepubs.com. The discount is applied automatically when you add to cart. Here is a link to The Mantram Handbook on that site.
For this week’s spiritual treat, let’s dip back into the Audio Talks section of the Easwaran Digital Library. This is a vast collection of talks that will be permanently available. Let’s continue with the Patanjali talks,** this time beginning Talk Two. The full talk is over an hour, but you can listen to part of it now and when you return the player will resume where you left off. If time is short, consider starting with just the first five minutes, where Easwaran draws on mystics east and west in his introduction on divine grace.
* For those using electronic versions of The Mantram Handbook with different page numbering: this week’s reading includes the Preface and the beginning of Chapter One, ending before the subheading “The Power of the Mantram.”
** You’ll need to log in for the link above to work. If it’s your first time, use the button Create new account from the login page.