Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 16:16:21 -0500
From: Unka Bart <mendicant-AT-buddhist.com>
Subject: re: Whatever this thread was, I forget...


> >I quite agree.  But as the Ol' Goat noted, in his recent dollop of wisdom
> >on the subject of prayer, these tools work just dandy *without* any
> >(religious) "faith" component.

Scott jumps in:

> Hey, J.D. Salinger wrote a book about something like that (well, two
> longish short stories within a single cover), stemming from an anonymous
> 19th century Russian religious book called 'The Way of the Pilgrim', which
> has (if I remember right) a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, and as he
> travels, as asks each person he meets if they can help him and he's finally
> turned on to praying without stop.  The idea is to repeat a prayer (in this
> case I believe it was "Lord, have mercy on me") constantly, and after a
> certain length of time, it would become automatic and was supposed to lead
> to some sort of religious enlightenment, and the nifty part was you weren't
> required to even believe, it worked anyway.

That's "mantra" meditation, pure and simple.  The Transcendental Meditation
folks, a non-spiritual moneymaking group, did this in the 70's (and
probably are still).  You paid them some money (a non-trivial sum, as I
recall) and they would give you "your special mantra" to chant.  And it
worked.

Repeating any "mantra" is merely another of those (effective) ways of
tricking the "conscious" mind by keeping it busy so that you can break past
it and see what lies beyond.

You can do this with meaningless sounds, maybe even more easily.  Sit
quietly in a comfortable posture, fix your gaze on a point on the wall, and
start repeating the mantra (sound, phrase, whatever).  Do this for 20
minutes, then tell us what happened...

Now, send me buckets of money...

Yer Kindly Ol' Unka Bart