I Just Say Amen

Despite my complicated relationship with yoga and yogis these days, I still follow along on some forums. In one of these, there was a question posed about whether or not yoga and Christianity are incompatible. In general, the consensus was no, but the people who would say yes are probably not the ones talking about it in a forum for yoga people. There were a few faithful who went on to say that when the class says Om, they just say “Amen”.

I’m ashamed to admit, I hadn’t noticed how similar these sounds are. Amen is like Om plus a syllable, which is interesting because I often think of Christianity as the plus religion. There was Judaism – Old testament – then plus more. Is Jesus in the Men? 🙂 I digress.

This morning I promised myself I’d dive back into the sutras.

To Exist is to have a Name

S. 27 Tasya vacakah pravanah.

The word expressive of Isvara is the Mystic sound of OM. (OM is God’s name as well as form.)

It’s no wonder I had trouble restarting this. I’m left off in the middle of some deep concepts. Infinity, infinite love, knowledge. For a review, visit here.

There are a few key points that Satchi makes up front here. First, it is language and naming things that allow things to be expressed. Of course, things can exist absent having a name, but in life, that which goes unnamed often goes unexamined. Sometimes I think about that in the frame of language and culture – not to be deterministic – but it has always amused me that certain languages have words for concepts that we all know exist, and certain don’t. Spanish has sobremesa – the time spent after a meal chatting with family and friends, German famously has Schadenfreude – joy in the misfortune of another, locally, we have the “wisconsin goodbye” – the hour it takes to leave any gathering, essentially.

However, words are different across languages and often imperfectly correlated, if at all, with form. The word for God though, it needed to be perfect. “Patanjali wants a name that can give an ultimate idea and vibration, and which can include all vibrations, all sounds and all syllables, because God is like that – infinite.” That is MMMM, made into OM.

OM is often written AUM (can I hear an Amen?). There is an unwritten component to it at the end, called anahata, or “the one that is beyond verbal pronunciation”. The anahata chakra or the heart chakra means unstruck or unbeaten. This used to confuse me (heck maybe it still does), but essentially it all the potential sounds in the universe. Sound happens when things come into contact, it is the sound that is out there waiting to be initiated.

Is love a sound, I wonder? Do we need contact for love? That’s probably another post.

Amen or OM – or AUM? Satchidananda says: “Truth is one; seers express it in many ways.”