Hinduism · Dreams & the Unconscious
Symbol · Symbols of the Religions
Om
The Imperishable Syllable
Held to be the sound of ultimate reality itself — one syllable, and continuous with the self who says it.
What it meansThe Mandukya Upanishad takes it apart: A, U and M are waking, dream and deep sleep, and the syllable's fourth part is the silence after it — turīya, which is not a state but the reality the other three occur in. The teaching is in the stopping, not the sounding.
Thread · 8th century
Kuṇḍalinī
The Coil Before the Spine
The coiled goddess-power whose rising means liberation — exact in the texts, vague in every summary since.
SignificanceShe lies coiled three and a half times at the base, asleep, stopping the central channel with her own mouth — so the obstruction and the power are the same thing. Waking her opens what she was blocking, and the rising is a return rather than an ascent to somewhere new.
The FindingThe serpent asleep at the base of the spine is the later location; the earliest kuṇḍalinī, in eighth-century Śaiva tantra, is a coil in the heart, and the syndrome named for her was coined in 1976.