01 January 2014 - QA 2

Gurudev, do you read books?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Usually I don’t read books at all but last year when I was taking a long flight, from Japan to Canada, I read a book someone gave me called The Proof of Heaven. This was written by a doctor who went into coma for 7 days. People thought his brain was dead and he would not come back. When he did come back he wrote his experience. He said when he left his body he saw this light, a most loving light which he called Om. He said, ‘That light is my source’.
He has not read any scriptures before. He was an atheist. He would go to church only on Christmas Day, once a year, but never believed in anything.

There are many Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and all have reported the name of the universal light, the universal sound as Om, and this is what is said in the scriptures also, in the Upanishads and in the Vedas.
Lord Buddha had also said this. Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Sikhism and thousand of saints who were born in India, they all said that one sound is Om. That is our experience also.
When you go deep in meditation, the one hand clapping or the sounds that exists is Om. That is the source of everything. So Om is that universal sound. Scientists have also written this and experienced it.

When we go into deep silence and the mind is totally still, there is a hum and that hum is Om.
Aa, Uu, Mm. Aa is the creation opening up, Uu is its continuation, and Mm is its completion.
Om has many meanings, hundreds of them. Peace and love are some of them; Origin of life.

In the beginning the word was there, and the word was God. It is said in the Bible. Aa, Uu, Mm became Amen. A little distorted, it became Amen. And in Islam it became Ameen. But the original sound was Om which was there from thousands of years. There's more, we can go on talking about it. Instead of philosophizing or trying to understand it too much, you simply say Om.
Aa, the vibrations are in the lower portion of the body, Uu in the mid and Mm in on top part. So the prana is complete, it goes from bottom to top when you say Om.
Om is used in meditations by all religions, all sections of people for thousands of years. So we continue to use it.