What is Soham

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 3 years before Dec 19, 2016

MiBeloved 3 years ago

Email Correspondence:

What is the meaning of soham?

MiBeloved's Response:

There is no such Sanskrit word.

It is sah aham which means

Sah = he

Aham = I

Rough it is:

I am he

Or He I am

Who is he?

We have to go to the reference which is the Upanishads.

There, the discussion is about brahman or spiritual reality.

“I am he,” is therefore I am this or that or whatever brahman is defined to be

To see how the Upanishads explain brahman you have to go through them and see the various opinions.

When this terms is used by the Advaita exponents it means

I am that spiritual reality

It is related to

Tat twam asi

Which is: that you are?

Tat = that

Twam = you

asi = are

When the disciple would ask the guru during the Upanishadic periods as to who the disciple was, the guru would say you are that which I was describing to you, which is brahman

And again what is brahman. There is no straight forward answer. One has to comb through the Upanishads and then draw conclusions, opinions, belief or conviction from there.

=======================

People who feel that, or who experience, God as a person do not follow the Advaita system like this because that system denies an ultimate social situation.

For them:

I am he.

Or

You are that.

Is too vague and does not clarify anything

While the Advaita Vedantis say that merging causes a loss of individuality but a gain of oneness, the Dvaitis or personalists, say that merging is like when a green parrot enters a forest. The parrot maintains its individuality even though it appears to have merged. Therefore to say that the parrot is or has become the forest is ridiculous to them.

Paul 3 years ago

Michael wrote:

It is sah aham which means

Sah = he

Aham = I

Roughly it is:

I am he

Or He I am

Who is he?

Paul's Reply:

The question must be posited then, What is the Sanskrit word for I-Self or I-self?

it would seem that the eternal philosophical battle between the Personalists and the Impersonalists can only be resolved individually and experientially otherwise one just

believes one or the other, and the tedious argument continues...and if it comes down to belief , then who is the person to believe...what is his character, and in reference to Patanjali, he calls this a way of knowing through :"a reliable testimony",, and sometimes that's the best you can get.  The Yogi however wants to find out for himself.  Religion has a to do with the belief energy, but yoga has to do with getting the experience.. as a man in modern times we are presented with two testimonies,

and two sincere testimonies at that...

Surely there is more in heaven and earth than is written in your philosophies,

so all that is left now is to FIND OUT for yourself..

the following is a response to a review Michael gave the last banner I posted, but

providence prevented me from posting it in a timely fashion, and for my part, in that I apologize... but I'm inserting the response which I feel further illustrates what was just said, in the above...

Thank you for the nice review i totally agree with this but did not possess the language or understanding to describe it....but this is true that through mystic sight sound has a visual counterpart. It also has a textural taste and Fragrance aspect  as well, listening is doorway. So is "looking.

In a way it's like my old friend Andy Abraham used to tell people who say that Bob Dylan can't sing.: he would tell them ,"you can't listen"!

In a way one could say that concentration is like  listening and  meditation is like Hearing, samadhi  extending the two into mystic seeing accompanied by insight and mystic understanding.

In a way, each sense is really taking in certain specific kinds of information about "something".  As in the old example of the five children looking through a hole in the fence..each hole is a sense...through one sense, one smells the elephant, another experiences the texture trough the skin organ, and so on...until the question arises as to what is that whole object and who is getting the experience....

The naad as far as my research tells me is the same thing as the illustration depicts.  Only with the naad, the partial experience of the audio aspect is merely a doorway to where that sound originates and who or what is producing that sound. It only becomes complicated when you look scientifically at what is sound itself in the first place, and perhaps this antiquated thinking... like St. Thomas Aquainus who figured that if there's a bell, there must be a bell maker, and if there is a sound, then there must be something that produces the sound.

Like Lord Brahma who HEARD the word Tapas (which by the way, in the Siva Puranna, is translated as another word for Meditation.. Doing Meditation, is regarded as Penance, the other word used...