Interesting article here:
http://mysterytopia.com/2008/07/meditate-on-it.html It doesn't really explain how mantras came to be so powerful, if indeed they are actually different from any other randomly chosen sound. It was always the way my mantra affected me that made me wonder how my mind could have come pre- adapted for transcendence. If you accept the facts of Darwinism then you accept that we evolved a transcendence response. Interesting idea that it evolved with us as us trying to do something else and must have done or who would have kept on with it. I think we are pre-adapted in that our brains are so complex things or tehcniques, even drugs, knock us off centre and because we have such a clever illusion creator in our heads that disrupting it can give us a glimpse of what we call heaven for no other reason than it is so pleasant. So it's either a big fluke or there is cosmic significance in how we seem to be born capable of experiencing what is, for us, a "holy" state of mind. Maybe mantras have been in use so long we've evolved a sympathetic response to them. But that surely would take us way from india where the traditions are strongest. Sanskrit isn't the earliest language I think. Does anyone know what the earliest known mantra technique is? Difficult to know but even the geographic whereabouts of early spiritual cultures would be interesting.
