THE OM --- WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

Photo : Swami Shantananda, disciple of Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, in perpetual perception of the Om.
But the real Om is the unvibrated 'sound'. Hence, this thesis falls flat if taken literally. The purport must be understood in terms sublimely subtle for the Om lies at the interface of the manifest and the unmanifest as the dicotyledonous seed of the twain. Swami Shantananda, one of the earlier disciples of the Holy Mother, used to 'hear' the Om uninterruptedly from the year 1916 when it began all of a sudden. He used to urge the junior monks like Swami Bhaskarananda to try and 'hear' the Om when they would go on austerity tours through the Himalayas. Shantanandaji was perpetually in the 'Om mode', if I may be allowed the literary license to label it so, and this, in other words, meant that the venerable sage was habitually in the transition state between the phenomenal and the absolute, perhaps, passing into multiple samadhi (spiritual ecstasy where diverse thoughts are quelled in the silence of integrated flow or no flow at all in the realm of the Vast Void) a day, effortlessly and with a spiritual spontaneity mastered out of earlier rigour when the first footsteps were measured out metrically and meaningfully, the fruition coming in its wake as the fulfilment of this labour of love.

There is, thus, a huge misconception about the inconceivable Om that defies description, being beyond the terrain of verbal turbulence we term this phenomenal world. It is the unutterable essence of all utterances, beyond speech and sound, ever eluding expression, yet, engendering it. The Om has to be ever approached, never quite attained in the material sense, and may be merged into when all sense of the phenomenal has been resolved to its roots, the ego obliterated in the moment of resolution and the lower self sublimated till its residuum but remains in the Self sublime, existent, blissful, super-conscious. Shantanandaji was a phenomenon in this regard, being blessed by the Holy Mother into subtle sensitivity of the Seed Word whence spring countless universes without beginning and without end. However, what he perceived may not be easy to apprehend in our common sense of audible perception, and herein lies the difficulty of realisation of what sages and saints say and the perversion of their utterances in common understanding. It is, thus, enjoined that strict spiritual observances, firmly founded in continent living, be maintained on a disciplined basis for a protracted period of time, so that, in the fullness of fruition, it may induce the state of the perception of the Om just prior to the zeroing into one's own infinitude. Hence, we must be wary of these easy pronouncements on abstruse matters and not so gullible as to delude ourselves into false understanding and foolish practice thereon.