What are mantras?
Meditation and mantras have been used in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and many other spiritual practices for thousands of years. In other words, they go deep..
I'm mostly interested in them for wordly reasons - relaxation, creativity, and fulfillment - and grew up Christian before becoming agnostic so prefer to avoid invoking a god or goddess while practicing.
Because of that, when I recently started looking into meditation and mantras, the most obvious options seemed to be a either Purposeful Mantra or a Meditative Mantra.
Purposeful Mantras are focused on achieving a clear outcome like money, health, or love. These are very decent goals to have but the approach sounded a bit like Manifestation, which is not my jam. However, if that does interest you then Mantra Maker might be helpful.
That left Meditative Mantras, which brought me to..
Transcendental Meditation and their mantras
By all accounts, Transcendental Meditation (TM) uses mantras that are simple sounds, chosen for their vibrational quality rather than meaning, in order to transcend thought and achieve deeper states of awareness.
That made sense to me, since using a word like "cloud" or "ocean" could easily trigger thoughts about its literal meaning and distract me from the meditation. So much sense, in fact, that I signed up for their preparatory session and met with a teacher. The session itself was good but I was left wondering about their mantras, one of which would be given to me as part of the paid course..
Curious, I did some searching and found that there's apparently a standard list of mantras based on the student's current age. These mantras are also Sanskrit words taken from prayers to various Hindu gods:
| Age range | Mantra | Hindu god |
|---|---|---|
| 0-11 | eng | Saraswati |
| 12-13 | em | Saraswati |
| 14-15 | enga | Saraswati |
| 16-17 | ema | Saraswati |
| 18-19 | ieng | Saraswati |
| 20-21 | iem | Saraswati |
| 22-23 | ienga | Saraswati |
| 24-25 | iema | Saraswati |
| 26-29 | shirim | Mahalakshmi |
| 30-34 | shiring | Mahalakshmi |
| 35-39 | kirim | Kalika |
| 40-44 | kiring | Kalika |
| 45-49 | hirim | Bhuvanessvari |
| 50-54 | hiring | Bhuvanessvari |
| 55-59 | sham | Krishna |
| 60+ | shama | Krishna |
So who are these gods and what do they do?
- Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, wisdom, learning, arts, and music
- Mahalakshmi is the goddess of wealth, prosperity (both material and spiritual), and beauty
- Bhuvanessvari is the Cosmic Mother, Queen of the Universe
- Kalika (Kali) is the goddess of time, transformation, destruction, and power
- Krishna is the Avatar of Vishnu, god of love, compassion, and divine play
- Agni is the god of fire and divine messenger (his mantras - ram and shriram - are no longer used)
Reading more, this corresponded to what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, wrote in his 1955 book "Beacon of the Light of the Himalayas" which says that:
Any word, even the word mike can be taken ... we find that any sound can serve our purpose of training the mind to become sharp ... we select only the suitable mantras of personal gods. Such mantras fetch to us the grace of personal gods.
Now I was confused because it seemed like these mantras were:
- Not personalized at all beyond age
- Taken from Hindu prayers so not really without meaning
- Tied to a faith other than my own
To be clear, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that and the idea of focusing on pure sounds still resonated with me; these particular sounds just felt too loaded for my taste.
I decided to focus on the first sentence written by Maharishi above, that "any word, even the word mike can be taken" and thought about coming up with similar mantras that focused purely on the sound, without any Sanskrit roots or any intrinsic meaning.
The result is..
Create your own mantra
The goal is to generate sounds that have no meaning in any language and have good vibrations, literally! There's a big chance that these words exist in some language, though, so just bear with me..
If a particular mantra doesn't sound or feel right when you say it, create a new one! You can also just choose a sound of your own; just remember that words with meaning can distract us during meditation..
What's next?
Now that this tool is out in the wild, I'll focus on the meditating part and see about those health benefits. Depending on how it goes, I might still seek out professional guidance - whether TM or otherwise - since we can all use help from time to time.
Did you find the tool useful or have any ideas on how to improve it? Please let me know!