july 3 aum
Been trying to write all day and, like, it just didn't happen. Or hasn't happened. "Hasn't" feels like a more optimistic word, actually. It hasn't happened but it still might. Better out than in, after all. That's the mantra. It used to be "this too shall pass" but that felt a bit too "live, laugh, love" at a certain point.
I don't know what "mantra" means. Not really. It's one of those words whose meaning I might only know by context and culture. Like, I know how we use it, and how I use it, and I know what it is shorthand for. But I just had to consider, perhaps for the first time, that I might not know what a mantra is outside of its "better out than in" or "this too shall pass" context in my culture.
(Of course I know what a mantra is.)
(It is a prayer.)
(Not like the Lord's prayer but maybe not unlike it.)
(I am not a religious person though I know a lot about religion.)
(And, moreover, post isn't about that.)
(It's about how people in the west consume.)
(It's about how the west co-opts.)
(And corrupts.)
(And redefines.)
(And how that is so, so, so political.)
I spend a lot of time these days talking to people about how bad everything is. I don't want to, but I do. It's hard to avoid. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't wreck my day or steal all my joy, It's usually a conversation about the United States specifically, but I often broaden it to "the West" because, the States is the worst offender here, but not the only one. Anyway "mantra" got me thinking of the process that has to happen to turn this:
A mantra (/ˈmæntrə, ˈmʌn-/ MAN-trə, MUN-; Pali: mantra) or mantram (Devanagari: मन्त्रम्)is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words (most often in an Indo-Iranian language such as Sanskrit or Avestan) that practitioners believe to have religious, magical or spiritual powers.
To this:
The second definition is more general: a word or phrase that is often repeated and expresses a particularly strong belief. For instance, a football team can choose individual words as their own "mantra."
And this:
To this:
The word mantra is also used in English to refer to something that is said frequently and is deliberately repeated over and over.
All these selections are verbatim from the Wikipedia entry.
When I was younger I always wondered why we called photocopies "Xeroxes" and tissues "Kleenexes." As a precocious tween I studied words, etymologies, and translations as much as I could. I needed to know. I needed to understand. This continued through high school and at McGill, where I was more concerned with semiotics, semantics, and the like. And now I'm 48. Welcome to now.
It should not escape anyone's notice that foreign words, ideas, and practices —— especially spiritual ones —— get stripped of their original cultural contexts and repackaged for Western audiences to be reborn as consumables. The industrialization of spirituality (yoga, meditation, mindfulness, wellness, and yes, mantra) is obvious, but this kind of thing is so ingrained in Western culture that maybe it's not as obvious to some folks.
If you read this far, thanks.
Better out than in.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch drink
🌳 grass tea
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
==If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's [Discovery feed]