Meditation on OM
The teacher says this is a very important point which is made in the book called The Heart of the Eastern Mystical Teaching where an example is given of a great sage, who had no intellectual acquirements and no special advantages, no physical advantages at all; and yet the holy truth is expressed through him. This is not a brilliant mind at all, nor highly trained mind, but it’s expressed very clearly. It’s very clear expression and a very beautiful one.
This is our brief outline. Shankara says there is a projection and he simply says there is the projection of the great elements; but he begins the whole text with the word OM. His disciple Sureshvara in his commentary says this OM, this word itself, means that this projection is partly an illusory projection. It’s not absolutely real, and for that reason it can be withdrawn; but it’s beautiful as our teacher often stressed. This is not to be taken as wholly real, but it is beautiful and it is put forth by intelligence, by the Lord out of his own maya, his own cosmic power.
Anandagiri in his commentary on this says that the projection, the account of the great elements, points to Tat, That. The account of the subject, of the waking state, who is not the same as the dream subject and not the same as the subject of the deep sleep state, these accounts point to Twam, or Thou – and that the whole text is an example of ‘That Thou Art’, which is actually quoted by Shankara towards the end. There is a worship of God as the creator of the universe. This is Shri Shankara’s definition: “That from which the whole of the universe has come forth, by Whom it is sustained, into Whom it is finally dissolved.” This is his definition.
Then there is Thou, who is the witness Self in man, which witnesses the waking, and witnesses the dream, and witnesses the deep sleep. This is an important aspect of meditation, consciously to enter the third state of deep sleep – to find a witness in that, as a witness in the waking state and a witness in the dream state. Swami Rama Tirtha calls this ‘returning to the roots’ – silence, not only of the lips, but of the thoughts too. In the Shri Dada Sanghita one of the accounts is given. “Shut out all the thoughts, suspend the mental and the sense-consciousness; what still persists is jnana, is knowledge”. We feel, “There won’t be anything. Nothing will remain. The sense-awareness is shut out, and the thoughts are shut out. Then nothing will be left. We have no experience of anything apart from that.” But the teacher says this is to confuse thought and sense-experience, which are waves in consciousness, with consciousness itself. We think that consciousness varies. As the waves vary in height, we think people can be partly conscious or fully conscious, or unconscious. But, in fact, there is consciousness which persists throughout all those states.
One part of the analysis is the effect after deep sleep of jnana-like inspiration. “In the last stage he worships the Lord in the first person. The Lord becomes his own Self. It is the essence of man’s personality. That is man’s Self. The Lord becomes his own Self, and all duality comes to an end. The veil of sansara is lifted. There is no longer an I or Thou, mine or thine, but only one cosmic consciousness in which the universes rise and fall like bubbles in the sea.”
These are the texts that are intended to awaken an interest, meant to awaken something and then by study and by enquiry the whole of the personality gradually becomes focussed. Until that happens there won’t be much progress, it will only be an intellectual interest; but when the whole of the personality begins to become focussed – the value, the feeling, the intellect and the will – then the yogic process begins to stir the Self which is within.
There’s an actual concrete illustration of how Swami Rama used the OM technique. He said at the beginning to repeat OM audibly and he says, in many places – and this was quoted by our own teacher in one of his essays on OM – that he must feel the vibration of OM as if it were a bell in every pore, in every atom of the body, not just from the throat. If you see a bell struck, when you touch it you can feel the vibration. In the same way the OM makes the whole body vibrate. Swami Rama Tirtha says this vibration becomes perceptible more and more, it’s like a bell.
He says, “The meaning of OM is ‘I am all. I am the sun. I am the light of the sun. The sun is my shadow. The meaning of OM is ‘I am’. Say it through language, feeling, action. If you call a child, ‘Child, come along’ [there’s] no force in your words. When another child, who has been absent and whom you have been longing to see, comes you say, ‘O come child, come’ – speaking through every nerve, every hair, you fly to him, cling to him, clasp him. This is the language of feeling. Chant OM with every fibre of your body. Begin with little force. The sound first comes from the throat, then the chest, lower and lower down, until from the base of the spine. Then electric shock, opening of sushumna. Your breathing becomes rhythmical. All germs of disease leave you.
“A Vedantin looks on the sun as related to himself in the same way as is the moon to the sun. ‘The moon appears to shine by herself, but all the light comes from the sun. So the sun appears to shine from his own grandeur, but that grandeur comes from my Self.’ In dreams you see various things, say an electric light. In dreams there’s no light to show the objects. What is that light which shows you the electric light in a dream? It is the light of your own Self. ‘The grandeur of the sun in your dreams is your own light; and in waking the glory of the sun is seen through my glory,’ so does the Vedantin feel. The sun in the material world is the emblem of light and knowledge; thus by looking at the sun I feel, ‘I am the light of knowledge’. OM has a symbol in a hieroglyphic, written in the sun in characters of gold.”
If you would like to do this last meditation. It’s to meditate on the sun, seen in the dawn sky and in it there’s the character for OM. The sun is shining, stationary in the dawn sky and the OM is written on it.
Titles in this series are:
1. There are five subtle elements
3. Consciousness underlies all
The full talk is OM and meditation
© Trevor Leggett