Your vehicles are ever restless.  Every vibration in the vehicle produces a corresponding change in consciousness.  Is there any way to check these vibrations, to steady the vehicle, so that consciousness may be still?  One method is the repeating of a mantra.  A mantra is a mechanical way of checking vibration.  Instead of using the powers of the will and of imagination, you save these for other purposes, and use the mechanical resource of a mantra.  A mantra is a definite succession of sounds.  Those sounds, repeated rhythmically over and over again in succession, synchronise the vibrations of the vehicles into unity with themselves.  Hence a mantra cannot be translated; translation alters the sounds.  Not only in Hinduism, but in Buddhism, in Roman Catholicism, in Islam, and among the Parsis, mantras are found, and they are never translated, for when you have changed the succession and order of the sounds, the mantra ceases to be a mantra.  If you translate the words, you may have a very beautiful prayer, but not a mantra.  Your translation may be beautiful inspired poetry, but it is not a living mantra.  It will no longer harmonise the vibrations of the surrounding sheaths, and thus enable the consciousness to become still.  The poetry, the inspired prayer, these are mentally translatable.  But a mantra is unique and untranslatable.  Poetry is a great thing:  it is often an inspirer of the soul, it gives gratification to the ear, and it may be sublime and beautiful, but it is not a mantra.

Attention

Let us consider concentration.  You ask a man if he can concentrate.  He at once says:  “Oh! it is very difficult.  I have often tried and failed.”  But put the same question in a different way, and ask him:  “Can you pay attention to a thing?” He will at once say:  “Yes, I can do that.”

Concentration is attention.  The fixed attitude of attention, that is concentration.  If you pay attention to what you do, your mind will be concentrated.  Many sit down for meditation and wonder why they do not succeed.  How can you suppose that half an hour of meditation and twenty- three and a half hours of scattering of thought throughout the day and night, will enable you to concentrate during the half hour?  You have undone during the day and night what you did in the morning, as Penelope unravelled the web she wove.  To become a Yogi, you must be attentive all the time.  You must practice concentration every hour of your active life.  Now you scatter your thoughts for many hours, and you wonder that you do not succeed.  The wonder would be if you did.  You must pay attention every day to everything you do.  That is, no doubt, hard to do, and you may make it easier in the first stages by choosing out of your day’s work a portion only, and doing that portion with perfect, unflagging attention.  Do not let your mind wander from the thing before you.  It does not matter what the thing is.