Transcendental Meditation (TM) Mantra Generator

Table of Contents:

• What are mantras?
• Transcendental Meditation and its mantras
• Personal Mantra Generator
• What's next?

What are mantras?

Meditation and mantras have been used in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and many other spiritual practices for thousands of years. In other words, they go deep..

I'm mostly interested in meditation for worldly reasons - relaxation, creativity, and fulfillment - and grew up Christian before becoming agnostic so prefer to avoid invoking gods or goddesses while practicing.

Because of that, when I recently started looking into meditation and mantras, the most obvious options seemed to be either a Purposeful Mantra or a Meditative Mantra.

Purposeful Mantras are focused on achieving a clear outcome like money, health, or love. These are very decent goals to have but the approach sounded a bit like Manifestation, which is not my jam. However, if that does interest you then Mantra Maker might be helpful.

That left Meditative Mantras, which brought me to..

Transcendental Meditation and its mantras

By all accounts, Transcendental Meditation (TM) mantras are simple sounds chosen for their vibrational quality rather than meaning, in order to transcend thought and achieve deeper states of awareness.

That made sense to me, since using a word like "cloud" or "ocean" could easily trigger thoughts about its literal meaning and distract me from the meditation itself. So much sense, in fact, that I signed up for their preparatory session and met with a teacher. The session itself was good but I was left wondering about their mantras, one of which would be given to me as part of the paid course..

Curious, I did some searching and found that there's apparently a standard list of mantras based on the student's current age. These mantras, shown below, are also Sanskrit words taken from prayers to various Hindu gods.

So who are these gods and what do they do?

• Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, wisdom, learning, arts, and music
• Mahalakshmi is the goddess of wealth, prosperity (both material and spiritual), and beauty
• Bhuvanessvari is the Cosmic Mother, Queen of the Universe
• Kalika (Kali) is the goddess of time, transformation, destruction, and power
• Krishna is the Avatar of Vishnu, god of love, compassion, and divine play
• Agni is the god of fire and divine messenger (his mantras - ram and shriram - are no longer used)

Reading more, this corresponded to what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, wrote in his 1955 book "Beacon of the Light of the Himalayas" which says that:

Any word, even the word mike can be taken ... we find that any sound can serve our purpose of training the mind to become sharp ... we select only the suitable mantras of personal gods. Such mantras fetch to us the grace of personal gods.

Now I was confused because it seemed like these mantras were:

1. Not personalized at all beyond age
2. Taken from Hindu prayers so not really without meaning
3. Tied to a faith other than my own

To be clear, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that and the idea of focusing on pure sounds still resonated with me. It's just that these particular sounds now felt too loaded for my taste.

I thought of the first sentence written by Maharishi above, that "any word, even the word mike can be taken" and decided to come up with similar mantras that focused purely on the sound, without any Sanskrit roots or any intrinsic meaning.

The result is a..

Personal Mantra Generator

The goal is to generate sounds with good vibrations and without any meaning in any language, literally! There's a big chance that these words exist in some language, though, so just bear with me..

If a particular mantra doesn't sound or feel right when you say it, create a new one! You can also always choose a sound of your own; just remember that words with meaning can distract us during meditation..

What's next?

Now that this tool is out in the wild, I will focus on meditating and see about those health benefits. I might also still seek out professional guidance - whether TM or otherwise - since we can all use help now and then.

For stressful periods on the go, I also built a tool for the box breathing technique to help with quick relaxation.

Any suggestions? Get in touch!