Smarana

Smarana means remembrance: the practice of repeatedly returning the sacred to mind in the midst of ordinary activity - while working, walking, cooking, waiting - rather than confining it to formal sessions of practice.

It is listed among the classical forms of devotion, and in some ways it is the most demanding of them, precisely because it has no protected container. A morning practice has a time and a place; smarana happens, or fails to happen, in the unprotected middle of the day, where forgetting is the default condition.

The traditions developed aids for it - beads carried in a pocket, names repeated under the breath, small marks placed where the eye would fall on them. Each is a technology against forgetting, and their variety testifies to how seriously the problem was taken. The practice assumes forgetting will happen constantly; its unit of progress is not unbroken remembrance but the remembering return, made again and again.

From the Editors' Desk, Shastra Digest.