Meaning of OM

We hindus believe in ‘’Gods’’ – yes not one God. Some believe in Shiva , some in Vishnu, some in Maa Durga and so on. For each God there is aarti and chalisa. Have you ever noticed that majority of these prayers begin with Om. But what is OM? Have you ever thought about it? Why it is used so often? Today in this post I put some light on the significance of OM.

Om sustains entire universe; not only physical universe but also the experience of it. The experiencer, the experience and the experienced, all three of them are OM. The physical body, the physical world and the thought world is OM. Thus, the sleeper and the sleep experience, the dreamer and the dream experience and the waker and the waking experience all these constitute what we call everything that is here. All these together represent ‘Om’.

It is written as OM, but if we chant it slowly syllable by syllable we can observe there are three sounds – a, u, m. If we close our eyes and sit in meditation position and chant only ‘a’, what we observe is that there is vibration in the genitals. After this if we chant only ‘u’, then there is vibration in our chest. Finally if we chant only ‘m’, then we can feel vibration in our head. So if we chant all the three syllables in continuation i.e. we chant OM, then vibrations travel from our genitals to our head.  So what we are doing is channelizing all our energy. We are extracting the energy which is not being utilized or used in some other activity. Basically we are trying to concentrate and giving our brain all the power we have. 

bhūtaü bhavad-bhaviùyad-iti sarvam Omkāra eva

What had happened before, what is now and what will be later

– Everything is just Om. (Māõóukyopaniùad)

Credits- Vinayak Kaushik, Art of Living