Mantra, Meaning, & Practice
[A significant portion of the retreat was given to the meaning, potential, and practice of Mantra.  A few notes are gathered from those sections:]

A quote from one of Babaji's charts states, "All the alphabets and their corresponding fractions, and the mantras comprised of them, are all intrinsically connected with the Self.  Due to the influence of nescience, the maya-shakti covers their true meaning and function, and the eternal Self takes on a sense of individuality and assumes atomic proportions.  Recitation of the mantra awakens the power inherent in the Word and restores meaning, thus wisdom."

Prana is your vehicle and mantra is the fuel in attaining Self-realization.  Devotional songs and hymns, scriptures, mantras, the mahavakyas - these are all connected.  Mantra will help one inspect the world; it will focus the mind.   Vitalization of the mantra requires connecting it with tattvajnan.  One must animate and charge up the chitta (thoughts of the mind).  In Kundalini Yoga, this is spoken of as bringing up the prana.  Do not animate the chitta with mundane objects, as these are hard to detach from later.  Instead, vibrate with the teachings and concentrate on the Ishtam, the Lord/Mother.  Later these can be dissolved easily into the Antaryami (inner ruler seated in the heart), and into Om.  Why are these easy to dissolve?  Because at the point one is able to concentrate fully on subtle knowledge and the Ishtam, one is already intuiting Om.  Thoughts easily fall by the wayside and awareness intensifies, infused with the presence of Om.  One's Awareness comes forward because the vibrating mind is not in the way anymore.

The human mind has trouble comprehending even 100 or 200 years of time, partly because we do not believe in our own perpetuity - that we have lived before.  "Creation, preservation, and destruction" is clumsy compared to "projection, sustanence, and withdrawal." In the latter view, even a 1000 years is nothing.  The way to understand this is via your three states of consciousness: waking, dream, and deep sleep.  In their earliest inspection of Consciousness in all its modes, the rishis realized that we turn the world on and off by the mind's power of projection.