Nuts and Bolts: mantras.

 Mantras have been used for thousands of years.

They sometimes use a real-world language, and sometimes a partial or invented one, and often a mixture of the two. The purpose of a mantra is to be a gateway to a new kind of perception. It might be to reveal something which can't be detected by the physical senses, or it might be to communicate with something which has no language (an animal, or a tree, or the sun, or some kind of god or devil). A mantra might be employed to cure an illness, spark love, make a task successful, cast a spell - or protect someone from a curse.

Some people might call this kind of thing magic, and a mantra, like magic, will often use words which only the initiated can understand. Secrecy is important. Even when a mantra uses the local language, meanings may well be ambiguous or deliberately misleading. 

When Islam came to Malaya, for instance, mantras carried on being used, but with the conventional formulae bismillahirrohmanirrohim at the beginning, and lailahailallah at the end, to make them sound Islamic.

Mantras tend to use chanting, and they tend to use repetition, both of which encourage a withdrawal from the thought-patterns of everyday life. They can also make the mantras beautiful - strange and familiar at the same time.

Nowadays few of us have time for mantras, and still fewer of us believe they serve any purpose.

But they're treasures of the world, all the same.

Thing To Consider Today: mantras. This word comes from the Sanskrit man- which means to think.

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