The Omkar Symbol

My book ‘Quantum Physics is NOT Weird’ contains much more information than the original Dutch title. One of this is about the Omkar, the Sanskrit name for Aum. When you study the description of this symbol in more detail the similarity with the idea of Cosmic Consciousness, that I unfold in chapter 12 – A possible Model, is striking.

My model of Cosmic Consciousness, as described in my book, has a number of levels:

The four levels of Cosmic Consciousness

1. Top Level: The Cosmic Consciousness – all-that-is.
2. An unimaginably large number of individual fragments. Not all fragments are necessarily always conscious of the shared virtual reality or even conscious in the sense we attribute to it. The unconscious state can be seen as the state of deep sleep. Some fragments dream their individual dreams, others share a common dream.
3. The shared memory. This is an all-encompassing storage of information. This is necessary to be able to share stories, history and experience. Storing any experience as information is responsible for the quantum collapse, the event that the non-physical quantum wave transitions into the observed object. From that moment on, that information is available to all individual participants in the virtual reality. This information store could be what is called the Akashic Records. It is probably not necessary for Cosmic Consciousness to have a dedicated memory to record and contain everything that happens in the virtual reality in its mind. Time is a human experience. It is conceivable that time as we know it does not exist and that all that has happened in the past and will happen in the future exists next to each other in a dynamic ‘now’. To retrieve the memory of a certain event, consciousness only has to ‘visit’ that event. This is reminiscent of Einstein’s block universe which is however static.
4. The shared virtual reality dream. This is the universe that we experience in the waking state and as happening outside of us, seemingly opposed to our inner world of thoughts and experiences.

De five levels of the Omkar

The five different elements of the Omkar symbol for AUM have been beautifully described in the Mandukya Upanishad.

Now compare the four levels of Cosmic Consciousness with those in the Symboldictionary description of the meaning of the Omkar decribed below.

1. The first curve (upper left) in the Om symbol represents the waking state or the conscious mind experiencing the world.
2. The second, almost closed, curve (right) is the dreaming state, the subtle world.
3. The biggest curve (lower left) means the deep sleep state or the casual plane.
4. The small curve (just below the dot at the top) signifies the absolute reality, atma, the self, or the pure consciousness.
5. The crown (the dot) signifies absolute surrender.

When curves 4 and 5 are combined they are called the bindu and represent the awakened state.

When I compare with the four levels of the Cosmic Cons­ciousness above, then allright, it’s not an exact match, but it’s close, intriguingly close.