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Our minds are assaulted constantly with images and ideas that upset our mental balance. Merely watching the daily news is enough to foster paranoia in even the most stable personality. In their translation of and commentary on the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali entitled How to Know God Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood described our normal mental condition as “a state of reverie -- a mental fog of disconnected sense-impressions, irrelevant memories, non-sensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort, excitement or ease.” Mantra repetition practice is like an antidote to the poison we feed our minds constantly in our media-saturated world. Isherwood writes: “If we introduce into this reverie the repetition of the name of God, we shall find that we can control our moods, despite the interference of the outside world. We are always, anyhow, repeating words in our minds -- the name of a friend or an enemy, the name of an anxiety, the name of a desired object -- and each of these words is surrounded by its own mental climate. Try saying ‘war’ or ‘cancer’ or ‘money’ ten thousand times and you will find that your whole mood has been changed and colored by the associations connected with the world. Similarly, the name of God will change the climate of your mind. It cannot do otherwise.”
-- William Schindler, Gay Tantra
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