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15: Mantras

The effect of chanting a mantra, internally or aloud, is to displace thought. Mantras are not a feature of the fourth way as I understand it, but the silent expression of work ‘I’s, short sentences or words whose aim is to help awakening, is intended at least to replace useless thoughts with useful ones. 

In the Fellowship, Robert Burton invented something called ‘the Sequence’ which was or is a string of six singlesyllable work ‘I’s strung together and works much like a short mantra. While I found it moderately useful some of the time, it would get in the way of being simply present, and its main use was to abandon it once one was in the moment. Doing exercises is not an end in itself, but being present to one’s life is. In the fourth way the central and original technique for freeing the mind from useless associations is self-remembering. 

In the SES a sitting mantra meditation was used, which one does for twenty minutes twice a day. It is the transcendental meditation introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and it was taught to SES students, when I was a member, by the Study Society, an organisation founded by Ouspensky’s student Dr Francis Roles. Initiation in those days cost a week’s pay, and since I was a student on a grant at the time, this did not amount to very much money in absolute terms. I was told that the mantra given was personal to me, however it became apparent later that everyone in the SES youth group had been given the same mantra.

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