Om in a nutshell
I copy the following verses from one of the ancient Hindu scriptures:
ॐ (Om).
ॐ असतो मा सद्गमय ( Om, Asato ma Sad Gamaya )
तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय ( Tamaso ma Jyotir Gamaya )
मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय ( Mrtyorma Amritam Gamaya )
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ( Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti )
Now, I’d like to contextualize Om using my personal story.
I am 23 years old in this body, but my Self is as old as time itself. I came to the United States at the age of 19 in order to study physics so as to learn the truth about reality; however, I came to discover with the passage of time that there is so much more to this reality than the empirical laws and mathematical models of the textbooks. Life in itself became a bigger teacher and a bigger field of study for me. And over the course of my life, my understanding of Om has gotten only deeper.
What is Om? I can not give you any answer beyond that it is a medium to discover the the universe. But let me describe you what’s in it.
While I can not quit myself from the miseries of this world (असत, Asat) that come into a variety of flavors: pain, pleasure, anger, and lust among others; practicing the philosophy of Om leads me to the way of righteousness (सद्, Sad).
Practicing the philosophy of Om leads me to the way of righteousness.
While I can not quit myself from a bad habit (तमस, Tamas), like smoking, the practice of Om sheds light (ज्योति, Jyoti) on my otherwise dull life. It gives me a purpose to move forward in an otherwise purposeless world.
The practice of Om sheds light on my otherwise dull life.
In this short life that I have been granted, I might pursue ambitions (for example, to become a great software engineer), but the singular truth of Death (मृत्यु, Mrityu) is humbling enough to teach us that all ambitions will perish. No matter how big our ambitions are, they will remain tiny specs in the overall spatial and temporal map of the cosmos.
But Om will provide me a vial of immortality (अमृत, Amrit) to stop death from taking my life away. This is because Om is the only way to escape from my little ego and unite with my bigger Self (recall that it is as old as time itself).
Om will provide me a vial of immortality to stop Death from taking my life away.
Like Jesus said, “I am the only way.” In this context, Om is Jesus, and Jesus is Om. Om is also the Buddhist way. It is the path to Allah. Om is the common teaching of all religions and practicable for every human.
Back in December, I travelled to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a college of my dream since teenage years. It was a journey to revisit my early ambitions of becoming a great servant of humanity, driving our civilization forward, either by researching on the structure of spacetime (aka physics), by lifting people off from poverty or by reducing inequity in the world. But I was done with this visit to my past in a few hours. My next destination was to visit Cambridge, MA and discover the hidden gem there: the life of a hermit, who barely wanted this kind of an ambition.
I rode the train to Concord to visit Henry David Thoreau’s self-built hut in front of the Walden pond. He had built this hut in the middle of nowhere to live with himself and with nature, breathing the freshest air of earth and of solitude. I wanted to see how badly I could want something like that. However, the first thought that came into my mind after looking at his hut was that Thoreau, like every other person in our history books, was dead. No matter the kind of life he lived, Death took him away. This thought liberated me from the vanity, and I realized then that I did not have to copy Thoreau’s life to live a prosperous life. I will be dead one day; so the only thing to prevent it would be Om.
All that I truly wanted in this journey, and in all of my life, is to immerse within myself and dissolve among the atoms and the waves of this universe. To discover peace (शान्ति, Shanti). Therefore, I choose in this life to fulfill my wants and desires and return to the tranquility of the natural manifestation of the universe, the Om.
All that I truly wanted in this journey, and in all of my life, is to immerse within myself and dissolve among the atoms and the waves of this universe. To discover peace (शान्ति, Shanti). Therefore, I choose in this life to fulfill my wants and desires and return to the tranquility of the natural manifestation of the universe, the Om.
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः (Om, Shanti Shanti Shanti).
