Mantra Japa:Thoughts Crowd

2 days ago By Yogi Anoop

Mantra-Japa: From the Crowd of Thoughts to the Silence of Experience

The innermost nature of a human being is inherently a creator of thoughts. Through the mind, a person continuously derives emotions by means of images and ideas. In the waking state, this inner consciousness, through the mind, generates thoughts and images with such emotional intensity that a person begins to wage inner wars within oneself.

The mind keeps producing thoughts, until eventually one becomes entangled in the very web of those thoughts. This is a profound truth: in daily life, the mind does not create anything truly new. It merely keeps polishing the nails fixed into the walls of past thoughts, experiences, memories, and impressions. Upon the same walls, it continues to construct new illusions and unnecessary thoughts.

Observing this constant activity and disorder, the guru tradition discovered a method—the mantra.

The original purpose of the mantra was to give direction to the mind so that the mantraka (the one who chants) could reach oneself. It was meant to shift the mind away from the uncontrolled, directionless, unnecessary crowd of thoughts and allow it to rest at a single point. By stabilizing the mind on one sound, one word, one vibration, the mind could reach the capacity to experience itself.

However, history took a strange turn—human impatience and the naivety of saints and teachers altered the original spirit of mantra-japa.

Gradually, a tendency developed to insert mantra into every moment of life, such as:

chanting while eating, chanting while walking,

chanting while talking, working, sleeping, and waking—continuous chanting.

Along with this came the insistence that the chanting must be fast—faster and faster—so that the chosen deity may appear quickly, so that God may be attained, so that some divine experience may occur.

This is where the mistake began.

The goal of the mantra was changed.

The mantra—which was a path to free the mind from thought—was turned into a means to obtain visions of gods and deities.

When the goal changed, the practice itself became distorted.

By inserting continuous mantra-japa into every activity of life, an opposite effect began to take place on the structure of the mind. Where the purpose of the mantra was to lead the mind toward silence, it began to make the mind even more active, more mechanical, and more tense. When chanting must run like a machine every moment, the mind never allows itself to rest; it becomes tired, breaks down, and mistakes tension for spiritual practice.

The truth is that the original principle of the mantra is extremely simple and extremely profound—

the mantra halts the crowd of thoughts and leads the mind toward a thought-free experience.

Through the mantra, ultimately the mantraka—that is, the presence of the sound, the existence of that vibration—should be experienced.

Mantra-japa is not a heap of words; it is a journey of experience.

If the purpose of the journey is changed, the practitioner experiences not benefit but harm—the mind becomes more restless,

emotions begin to lose balance, and tension takes the place of meditation.

The fundamental truth is this: the goal of the mantra is not to “see” God, but to make oneself “fit to be seen.”

The mantra calms the mind and leads it into that silent realm where the interference of thoughts ends and the doorway to self-realization opens.

The effect of the mantra arises when it does not limit the mind, but liberates it—

when it does not create continuity of thought, but depth of silence—

and when its repetition does not grant visions of a deity, but brings the experience of one’s own presence.

This is the true philosophy of mantra-japa.

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