Samadhi & Om

Though heavily influenced by Indo-Malay from Southeast Asia, maritime lands like the Philippines received Dharmic Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and Yoga influence, imperial Iberia and Midwest U.S. dumped themes and behavioral influence that did not become self-conscious until we stumbled on the presentations of comparative world religions that upended our built-in Judeo-Christian prejudices.

Samadhi came recently as the name of a restaurant in Bonham, Texas while with colleagues of the Realistic Living Institute. Having previously heard the Om/Aum pronounced in the state of Maharashtra in ’77, I understood how a simple sound reminds one of the possibility of living the totality of one’s life in what is referred to as “transcendence, immanence and transparency” wrapped in one. The sense denotes not separate parts of life but the treatment of the same as a whole, a seamless integration more than the sum of parts, a doer and a deed as one.

This runs counter to the current notion that life is what happens off-hours and on the weekends. Normal time in contemporary notion is making a living, a hustle in pursuit of the dollar. This is a global ethos. We earn a living first, then live a life on the side or in our leisure time!

The traditional passive tone of the om, written in Sanskrit as “that which is sounded out loudly,” is solemnly uttered like a elongated three-syllable reverberating a-u-m, a motion meditation and process contemplation, more active than the static state of “enlightenment” that subjugates the assertive passion of being. It is non-dualistic, the experience and the experiencer merging to one, the mind becoming still, united with the object of attention.

The number of speakers of South Asian tongues plus Sinos (read Buddhist, Taoist, and secular money chasers of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) are numerous along the paths we took from Texas to Chicago, San Francisco to Alberta, attesting to a growing familiarity, if not adherence, to aspects of Dharmic tradition.

But this is not about number of adherents. It is about the life understanding that folks outside of the tradition already recognize, especially those going through the pancake gates at Calgary Stampede this week. Often, we hear someone describe himself to be obsessed with something and the observer becomes one with the observed, the oneness of a meditator and the meditated, a thinker and a thought, a worshipper and what is worshipped. The mind loses its own consciousness and becomes identical with the object of its awareness.

Among mystics, this is the dissolution of a personality into the “being of God” that makes sense if we take the word G-O-D as referring to the totality of existence itself. It means living as a contemplative mystic in the din of a crowd, a walking dead among the breathing.

If this is still too abstract, let’s take it to the level of seeing. When a mirror shatters, there is no longer any reflected image. There is only existence of that which was once reflected. Or, if the sun is reflected in the water pool and the sun evaporates, the reflection of the sun is no longer there. There is only the pool and the sun’s existence.

Our difficulty of understanding the Om stems from the cognitive demand that we, as the observer, stand separately from an object observed. Samadhi claims the immediacy of consciousness more than the clarity of thought. We are not talking about being lost in a trance, like the out-of-body promotion of many spirit exercises. Rather, it is about being absorbed totally in full awareness—body, heart, mind, and soul—to the facticity of our existence.

Om in Hindi, Nepali, Gujarati, and Marathi scripts is a familiar symbol. If one wanders to the CK Hindu community, the omkara would be heard and the sign that looks like a figure 3 with a tail and a dot above a hovering saucer-shaped dash, is chalked or printed during holidays; the sound and sight are symbols of a state of being desired and attempted with all kinds of disciplines.

The intent and result with the Samadhi and the Om, and most religious experiences, is to be the one, unique, unrepeatable self that one is, a whole experienced as a self in the immediate and unmediated sense.

Why are we belaboring this point? There is a search for the “stillness of one’s soul” abroad among alternative lifestyles, moving away from the commercial ethos of money grabbing and acquisitive society that deteriorates into escapism, denying the immediate and substantive nature of our existence. There are many how-to books and advice on attaining this integration of body-heart-mind-soul polychotomy.

A faithful seeker asked a guru if the discipline ze was being taught would bring enlightenment. The beaming guru responded that enlightenment happens or it does not happen. But it cannot be induced. The “meditative” and “contemplative” practices can make one prone to the accident of enlightenment.

We aim to be accident-prone. That’s my story and I am sticking to it. Om.