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Personal Mantras:Time is the fire in which we burn

I don't have one mantra as they all seem to be fairly one sided generalizations of reality. Reality is far, far too complex to be "condensed" into a single mantra
 
Here I am, this isn't to bad. OP would you like me to add 'what is your mantra' or the like to the thread title?
 
"Accept, what is."

I don't actually use any mantras consistently, but this is the one, that I've used the most, I guess. Maybe not even in the sense of a mantra. Not sure. :)
 
The Handbook to Higher Consciousness advocated "All ways living love " but you wouold switch the emphasized word every time.
All ways living love
All ways living love
All ways living love
All ways living love

Personally the meaning of a mantra isn't important. I think the chanting soothes the verbal mind enough that you can move past the verbal self and that is the benefit. I have experienced my trans-verbal self other ways but as I'm heavily verbal repetitive verbal action seems to be a more reliable way to access my non-verbal states than a lot of others. Breath counting is probably second most common. Music has taken me there but it is a little less reliable for me.

Mantras to reinforce concepts or specific states is probably a whole different thing. In that case I think index cards in view of places I habituate and periodic reminders is probably better than an extended period of repeating a certain mantra. In that case having an actively thinking self paying attention is important. Verbal attention-word awareness is not that important for my usual purpose with mantras.
 
Enki said:
Here I am, this isn't to bad. OP would you like me to add 'what is your mantra' or the like to the thread title?
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Meh sure why not, bump the title to the thread and make the title that ting you say? Sounds grand.
 
Inedible said:
Watch Star Trek: Generations recently? ;)
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LOL do they say that on star trek? I got it from Djunya's Big Up magazine podcast no.14, that would be hilarious if its originally from star trek. Mind telling me what episode its from so I can torrent it up?
 
I generally find that the project of condensing one's entire weltanshauung into mantras or aphorisms fail to capture even a fraction of the complexity of what one is trying to express.

Having said that, I suppose "I loves the drugs, she is the banging" has always resonated with me as a distillation of the richest results of human intellectual endeavour.

On a more serious note, I find that I am too..."mentally active" seems self-aggrandising...doubtful and indecisive to place all of my mental eggs in one truth-basket in the way that choosing a mantra necessitates. A couple that I have previously held in high regard are "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence" and "Let justice be served, and the world burn". Neither of those represents my current beliefs one jot, and in fact I might say that the former is either trivially true, or totally false, depending on the sense one gives the terms, and that the latter is representative of the dangers of taking philosophy too seriously, and holding abstract principles above all else.
 
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QuasiModo said:
LOL do they say that on star trek? I got it from Djunya's Big Up magazine podcast no.14, that would be hilarious if its originally from star trek. Mind telling me what episode its from so I can torrent it up?
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Generations is one of the movies; the one where Picard meets Kirk.

I try not to fixate on mantras because everything I can think of seems to take on the wrong meaning after I start chanting. If I had to choose something though, it would be "the path is always in sight". I sometimes use this to remind myself that every bad step I take is transient, and in another step I'll be back walking my chosen path.
 
Affirmations are highly useful tools for psychological uplifting, directing this at Yerg. It's not about trying to capture the truth of anything when one chooses their mantra. It's not just some fact that you are murmur to the world just for the sake of the fact itself. The reason for the mantra must come within you.
Language and discursive propositions will always lend themselves to argumentation if the field is left open wide enough, so IMO the idea of choosing a mantra isn't about choosing something that no one can ever find fault with.
It's about latching our often paranoid, quivering, little egos, to something unchanging and simple that is meant to soothe and ease us.
It doesn't even have to directly mean anything at all, like when I think of the Zen Koans.
Some of the young monks in training ask all these serious questions about the nature of reality and the mind, and the older monks seem to take great amusement in their plight and give them some unorthodox riddle designed to get the mind out of the dangerous habit of balancing everything purely on a logical level so deeper connections in their thought patterns, about what is actually there, can be made.
Affirmations, or mantras, are ways of getting the mind out of it's ordinary mode of comparing, analyzing, stretching and contriving ways to interpret events, and they allow it to just experience.
That's what they're supposed to do anyway, it takes a while for a mantra to really sink in which is why it's healthy to keep a regimen of little mantras going at all times.

Me personally I have one from Jim Raynor of Starcraft 2 (lol) and it's the thing he says every time you click on him and tell him to move to an area: "Time to man up." With a goofy looking fist pump thing and a dead serious face.
Just the way he says it is so stereotypically macho and kinda cheesey that it's helping me get into the habits of just going for things and not complaining, just dive right into life, and also to see the funny side of things and be at ease. It's one of a few different ones, but it's the one that has helped me out the most too. Whoda thunk THAT, of any of the authors, or any of the books I read would somehow stick in my head as a mantra, but it does.
You're right, mantras do sit upon a mountain of truths that far exceed what is simply there to be seen, but that's kinda why they are there in the first place.
 
Great thread, OP!

I didn't think the point of a mantra was to condense your entire worldview into one sentence. It's not a slogan or a subtitle for your name. I thought it was something to focus on in order to direct your efforts and intentions. For example, if I climb the stairs in a creaky dark house whispering "There's no such thing as ghosts" to myself, I'm doing this to keep calm and induce bravery.

At the beginning of every pocket calendar or pocket notebook I've owned for the past 7 years or so, I've inscribed the phrase:
For the "I" that is yet to come. Om.
I first did this to a newly bought notebook during one of my first MDMA experiences, and it was, and continues to be, a driving force in my motivation to keep using a written set of lists and deadlines in order to combat the conscientiousness-killing effects of ADHD.
 
QuasiModo said:
LOL do they say that on star trek? I got it from Djunya's Big Up magazine podcast no.14, that would be hilarious if its originally from star trek. Mind telling me what episode its from so I can torrent it up?
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Oh haha, shows how much of a Trekkie geek I am.

Malcolm McDowell, who plays the villain in the film Star Trek: Generations says that quote. I always assumed it was something they concocted for the script. Turns out it's a line from a poem written by Delmore Schwartz in 1938. I think the nerd-geek inside of me immediately assumes that if it exists, Star Trek came up with it first, unless I'm proven otherwise. :D

Here's the full text, kind of a nice piece actually:

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn . . .)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
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If you choose not to respect yourself, you make your happiness subject to the opinions others have of you.

- Marcus Aurelius, ~AD 175 (Meditations)




Its amazing how non-dissimilar Zen and Stoic philosophies are
 
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