AUM and Hinduism

The legacy of Aum from the Puranas and the Vedas has made the complex Hindu rituals prominent and uniquely acceptable with the evolution of humans or the life on earth. Aum is the only sound that initiates the Hindu faith into a real or the ever changing universe. In making this sound more acceptable it has taken the scientific definition of a matchless vibration. OM (AUM) is said to be ‘Adi Anadi’, without beginning or the end and embracing all that exists. AUM has taken the leading role and is called the Mool (Mul) mantra because its attributes are the one that is in harmony with the ever changing universe, concluding that the spiritual efficiency of this vibration is heard not by the ears but by the heart and experienced by the living body.

The only description of Aum syllable in the Upanishads

The Mandukya Upanishad is the shortest of the Upanishads – the scriptures of Hindu Vedanta. It is in prose, consisting of just twelve verses expounding the mystic syllable Aum, the three psychological states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep, and the transcendent fourth state of illumination

The importance of a visual image for the audio mode of AUM

Over centuries sounds were difficult to propagate, so the thinkers gave it a visual image. Knowing that sounds are produced as a result of vibrations and that energy is needed to create the vibrations. The visual image of AUM when translated into icons got diffused over  eons and we used the ideology only to represent Aum in many forms that history remembered but the origin of the syllable OM was lost in the misty past only the recitation was passed on from generations to generations.

This gave us the freedom to describe the image of Aum in our own representations. When the image of Aum is seen by a devotee he or she would recite the mantra Aum mentally in a state of meditative consciousness. Therefore the visual image of AUM is important to a Hindu and where necessary it would be used by the observer to meditate on AUM.