What is Om?

I can remember the very first time I became acquainted with Om. I was about 5 years old, and my mother was teaching me how to sit “Indian style”. We were sitting in front of the TV, and she said, “Sometimes when people sit like this they say, ‘Ohhhhmmm’”. I asked her what that meant and she said she didn’t know.

Many years later, soon after I had begun began practicing yoga, I encouraged her to try it, so she attended a class at a nearby senior center with some friends.

“How was it? Did you like it?” I asked.

“It was alright,” she said, with some hesitation. “We Om-ed.”

“Oh really, what did you think of that?”

“I thought it was waste of time.”

“Well,” I said. “Om is a tool to help still the mind.”

“It didn’t still mine!”

Up until that point, I hadn’t really considered what Om actually was. All I knew was that I enjoyed chanting it at the beginning of class, and that it was one of the traditional rituals associated with Yoga. I assumed there was a spiritual, meditative element to it, but I didn’t analyze it too closely.

Since then, my understanding of Om has changed significantly. I suppose I could divide my understanding into two categories: one, by way of written and verbal knowledge; and two, by way of direct experience.

Om, also written as Aum, is said to be the sacred syllable representing Brahman, which is the eternal and absolute realm beyond all manifestations of reality. Therefore, we chant Om in order to celebrate, to revere, and to move closer to the source of all existence. It is a rally cry; it is a prayer; it is a vibratory vehicle.

A vibratory vehicle – but to where? Is Brahman a place to visit? Does it have a fixed location somewhere in space? Most texts say no – Brahman is incomprehensible; there is no way to reason your way toward it. Thus, chanting Om is one way to create conditions so that achieving union with Brahman is possible. Om is a means to still the mind, body, and spirit – to bring the totality of one’s vibrations into a uniform pattern, thereby providing the opportunity to shed all ties to the ego, and to either turn away from all perceptions of manifest reality or to perceive all of them at once.

Yet, for most, if not all of us, chanting Om does not bring us to a pure Brahman realization. Furthermore, Om does not render the possibility of realizing Brahman any less frightening. For me, whenever I transcend my baseline level of consciousness, my automatic response is one of abject terror. I liken the pursuit to the sport of free-diving. Free-diving is holding your breath, and swimming as deeply as you can toward the bottom of the ocean. So, I plunge into the deep, but when I reach a place too dark and unfamiliar, my chest screams out warnings of danger and I spurt to the surface, gasping for air. Then I regain my composure and plunge again, deeper than before, this time with knowledge of what lay ahead – until I encounter yet another level of Unknown.

However, during our retreat, Corina explained something about directly experiencing the Self (Atman), which I found very reassuring. And given that Atman and Brahman are inherently linked – the only difference being that the Self still experiences a degree of illusion in that it still considers itself separate from all things – then what she said applies here as well.

She said that you can’t experience the Self directly because you are the Self. You can only experience it by witnessing its radiance reflecting back to you. It’s just like looking into a mirror – meaning, you can’t see your face with your own eyes, but you can see it shining back at you from any surface that replicates objects with precision.

Somehow this analogy has a very grounding effect on me. Instead of thinking that the Self (or Brahman) is some mysterious and scary place to arrive, it allows me to realize that I already have arrived – and that there is nothing inherently dangerous in the pursuit of Self and Brahman. Previously, in the act of Self-pursuit, I would fear the existence of an imaginary threshold, which upon crossing, would thrust me into a schizophrenic realm of chaos, destroying my consciousness forever. In another way, I feared my own permanent death. But now, this analogy gives me confidence in the eternal nature of the Self. It allows me to believe that no matter what the external circumstance, there will always be a vantage point from which I can gaze peacefully at whatever manifests before me. Believing this, I feel safe. I feel like there is nothing to lose.

~

At this point, I would like to venture into a less subjective and more technical analysis of Om. Granted, this line of thinking is very new to me, so I’m sure there is a lot of hubris to what I’m about to write. At some future point, I would like to explore it more deeply.

None of what I wrote above answers what Om actually is. It might be a vehicle to achieve union with Brahman, but what is Om in-and-of itself? Does it have an inherent essence? And if so, what does that look like? What is the shape of Om?

Again, this line of questioning makes me think of String Theory. Also known as The Theory of Everything, it refers to one-dimensional oscillating lines, which upon curling and combining with each other, become the basis of all matter and energy – at the quantum level, the material level, and every level beyond and in between.

So, thinking back to the model of Aum described in our manual – the AAA, the UUU, the MMM, and the silence that follows – I ask the question, what happens when one of those lines begins to move for the very first time? What happens when it first rises from the ether that is Brahman and assumes its first form of existence? You might imagine it assumes an utterly primitive shape, a shape beyond all notions of primitive. It might embody oscillations, unimaginably miniscule.

You might also imagine these strings to live closest to Brahman. They have not yet evolved into any of the more complex combinations, which would live further from the core of existence.

And so, if your awareness is with Brahman, then perhaps you can “see” these younglings. Perhaps you can “hear” the sound they make.

And that sound might be pure and deeply resonant. It might sound something like the sound of Om.