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It is the third watch of the night. One man is lying on a bed, and inside him three worlds are taking their turns. A short while ago he was awake, and everything stood open in front of him, the crack running along the ceiling, the crease in the pillow, somebody coughing out in the lane. Then his eyes closed, and that same man began walking through another city, along streets that were never built anywhere, meeting people whose faces he had never seen. And now, at this hour, neither that city is left nor this room. No dream, no wish, and still he has not been wiped away, because in the morning he will sit up and say that he slept very sweetly. The Mandukya Upanishad raises a finger toward this man and asks who it is that is left over every single time, through all three of these conditions.
Nobody has to be persuaded that this round takes place. It took place last night, and it will take place again tonight, and it has been taking place since before there was any memory of it beginning. The strange part is how little attention the round gets. A man will study the weather, or the price of grain, or the moods of a neighbor, and never once sit down to ask what becomes of him in the hours when the lamp is out. Three conditions take him in turn, each one whole while it lasts, each one covering over the last so completely that while he dreams he has no suspicion of a bed, and while he sleeps without dreams he has no suspicion of anything whatever. Then each morning the same name returns to him, the same debts, the same face in the water of the basin.
This Upanishad of the Atharva Veda finishes itself in twelve mantras. No principal Upanishad is shorter, and perhaps none is denser. There is no king here, no student arriving with folded hands, no assembly in a forest clearing. There is one syllable, Om, and the twenty-four-hour traffic of one ordinary person, and by setting the two face to face this Upanishad shows that they are two readings of a single map. The later teacher Gaudapada wrote his karikas on these same twelve mantras, and the whole later architecture of Vedanta rose out of them, though those karikas form no part of this Upanishad. What follows is what these twelve mantras say in their own voice.
The main figures of this Upanishad
Om: the syllable that is spoken aloud and yet never wears away, inside which the three times and whatever lies past them are held.
Atman: the self, the real subject of these twelve mantras, which the Upanishad calls the one with four quarters.
Vaishvanara: the name of the waking one, whose awareness stays open toward the outside and who consumes what is solid.
Taijasa: the name of the dreaming one, whose awareness turns inward and who builds a world in a light of his own.
Prajna: the name of the one in deep sleep, where everything becomes one, and whom the Upanishad goes so far as to call the lord of all.
Chaturtha: the fourth, which the mula leaves unnamed and simply numbers, and which later usage calls turiya.
Om: the syllable in which all three times are held
The first mantra begins with no story at all. It lays a hand directly on a sound. “Om ity etad aksharam idam sarvam”, this syllable Om, this is all of it. The word akshara is doing two jobs at once in that line. Akshara is what does not wear away, what does not thin out, what never runs short. Akshara is also the thing that comes out of a throat, a noise, a syllable a child can repeat. In its very first sentence the Upanishad seats those two together, so that whatever never diminishes is found sitting inside the plainest sound a human mouth is able to make.
The same mantra goes on: what has gone by, what is running now, and what has yet to arrive, all of this is Om. So far the matter is still inside time. Then the mantra takes one more step. “Yach chanyat trikalatitam tad apy omkara eva”, and whatever else stands beyond these three times, that too is Om. The first line gathers up everything within time. The second gathers up the thing that time never manages to hold. After those two lines nothing at all is left outside, and this is the working method of this Upanishad, to draw the full circle first and then climb down inside it.
There is a small word in the mantra, upavyakhyana. Om is all this, and everything said afterward is the opened-out explanation of this one line. The remaining eleven mantras raise no fresh subject; they keep unfolding this single sentence. Knowing that before reading matters, because otherwise it will look as though the text wandered off somewhere in the middle, leaving sound behind and taking up states of consciousness in its place. It never wanders. This Upanishad shows one thing from two sides. From one side it is a sound. From the other it is our own day and our own night.
Why sound was given so much room is worth sitting with. The first bridge we have to the world is a name. A child learns the noise of a thing before he learns to touch it, and a thing whose name will not come to us is a thing we cannot hold inside ourselves for very long. This pairing of name and named runs so deep that the Upanishad turns it over and catches hold of it by the other end: if every single thing is tied to some sound, then there will also be a sound tied to no one thing, tied to the whole. That sound is Om.
And this is no foreign sound. Open the throat and let a voice come out, and that is a. Close the lips so the voice stays inside, and that is m. All the room lying between those two, where the voice rolls forward from the throat toward the lips, is u. Whatever a mouth is able to say, it says between those three stations. Om is placed here as the entire range of speaking, and in the eighth mantra these same three stations will be tied to the three states.
There is a further thing about this syllable that only the mouth can teach. Put a hand flat under the chin and say it once without hurrying. The jaw drops for a, and the sound is all throat, wide and unshaped, the noise a man makes when something is taken from him without warning. The tongue rises and the sound rolls forward for u, hollowing as it goes, the way a voice sounds when it is spoken into a clay pot. Then the lips close on m and the sound continues with no opening left for it, a vibration felt in the bones of the face. One breath has crossed the whole instrument from its far end to its near end. The Upanishad will spend four mantras on that crossing, and it can afford four mantras because the crossing carries the shape of an entire life inside the time it takes to let out one breath.
In short: the first mantra sets one syllable equal to the whole, first to everything inside time and then to what stands past time. Every mantra after it is the opened-out explanation of that one line. Sound was given this much room because a name is the first thread by which we take hold of anything at all.
This atman is brahman, and it has four quarters
The second mantra says in very few words what other Upanishads spend whole chapters on. All this that is here is brahman, the whole. And then, “ayam atma brahma”, this self, this very one, is brahman. Notice the word ayam sitting in the sentence: this one, the one in front, the one within arm’s reach. No distant brahman is being pointed at. The finger is aimed at whoever is reading at this moment, hearing at this moment, drawing breath at this moment.
In the same breath the mantra adds, “so’yam atma chatushpat”, this self has four quarters. Pada means a foot and it also means a fourth part, a quarter in the sense of loose change and a foot in the sense of the four legs under a cot. Both senses work here, with one caution. Shankara stops at this place to say that the first three quarters are a ladder climbed in order to reach the fourth, and that the fourth does not stand level with the other three as a fourth piece. That distinction is the key to the whole Upanishad, because the seventh mantra counts the fourth as fourth and then speaks of it in a language that breaks away entirely from the other three.
Now look at the road this Upanishad chooses in order to make its case. It raises no hand toward the sky. It tells no story of creation. It calls no sage as a witness. It takes us to the place we go every single day without fail: we wake in the daytime, we dream in sleep, and then we go down into a depth where nothing whatever is left. Those three places are its laboratory. Nobody has to travel anywhere, nobody has to take up anything new, and the only work is to look closely at what already happens three times in every twenty-four hours by itself.
One more thing comes out of this mantra that will be useful again and again. The object changes in all three states. In waking there is a world of brick and stone, in dream a world the mind has shaped, in deep sleep no world at all. The one in front of whom these three come and go does not change, and if that one changed, nobody would get up in the morning able to say that he was asleep and knew nothing. The one who knew nothing is the one who knows that nothing was known. This whole Upanishad stands on that small hinge.
In short: the second mantra sets atman and brahman as one and says that this self has four quarters. The four quarters do not sit as four equal pieces. The first three are a ladder and the fourth is the place where the ladder ends. For proof the Upanishad puts our own day and our own night on the table.
The first quarter: waking, where awareness lies spread outward
The third mantra introduces the waking one and gives him four marks. His station is waking, his awareness is bahishprajna, turned out toward the outside, he has seven limbs, nineteen mouths, and he consumes what is gross. The mantra opens with the station and the direction together, “jagarita-sthano bahish-prajnah”, whose place is waking and whose awareness faces outward. “Sthula-bhug vaishvanarah prathamah padah”, Vaishvanara who feeds on the solid, this is the first quarter. Look at the name. Vaishvanara, belonging to all the men of the world, the shared one. In waking we are all inside one and the same world, so the name of this state is a name of common property.
The mantra gives the count of the seven limbs and leaves the list alone. Tradition opens the nineteen mouths this way: five senses of knowledge through which the world comes in, five organs of action through which we go out, five pranas by which the body keeps running, and mind, intellect, ego and memory, nineteen in all. Mouth here carries the sense of a doorway for eating. A waking man is taking the world inside through nineteen doorways at once and never notices it, because it all happens so fast that the whole thing comes across as one plain, single experience.
Bahishprajna is the real key to this state. In waking, the mouth of our awareness faces outward. Whatever comes in front of it, awareness takes that shape. You look at a clock and for one instant there is a clock inside you, somebody calls and there is a voice, you pick up a cup of tea and there is warmth. This runs all day, and by evening a man is tired even though he may have lifted nothing heavy. Flowing outward without a pause is by itself a labor.
Try for one minute the thing the mantra is describing. Sit still and let attention do what it does by itself. A dog barks two streets away and attention is instantly out at the dog. A draft moves across an ankle and attention is at the ankle. The refrigerator stops its humming and attention goes to the place where the humming was. It never waits to be sent. It leaps, it takes the shape of whatever it lands on, and it holds that shape until the next thing tugs it loose. Across a whole day there is no moment when it is left holding nothing at all. That constant outward leaning is the first quarter, and it passes unnoticed as a condition the way the pressure of the air on the skin passes unnoticed until a storm comes through and changes it.
Calling him sthulabhuk is deliberate too. What we consume in waking is solid, it has weight, and it will not change to suit us. The wall stays where it stands no matter what we think about it. This is the strength of the state and it is equally the bond of the state. The strength, because things here can be relied on and are shared with other people, and all transaction rests on that sharing. The bond, because here we take ourselves to be exactly as large as this body, and every pleasure and pain of the body becomes our own pleasure and pain.
This Upanishad does not belittle waking. It calls waking the first quarter, and being first carries no sting here; in the ninth mantra this same firstness will come back as a fruit. Waking is the ground the journey starts from, and a man who has not learned to look carefully while awake will hardly see much while asleep. So the work of this state is to wake properly, and to know that the world we have taken for the whole truth is the truth of one portion out of four.
In short: the first quarter is Vaishvanara, whose awareness stays open outward and who takes the gross world in through nineteen doorways. The name itself says that this state is held in common by everyone. The Upanishad calls it first, and that firstness comes back later as a fruit.
The second quarter: dream, where the world is built from inside
The fourth mantra repeats nearly the same sentence and changes two words, and with those two words the whole world changes. The station is dream, awareness is antahprajna, turned inward, the seven limbs are the same, the nineteen mouths are the same, and what is consumed is pravivikta. “Pravivikta-bhuk taijaso dvitiyah padah”, Taijasa who feeds on the subtle, this is the second quarter. The limbs and the mouths staying the same means that the same full apparatus is at work in dream as well, with its fuel changed.
In dream the eyes are shut and we go on seeing. The ears are shut and somebody calls us. Nothing at all is coming in from outside, and a whole city stands there, with staircases in it, and weather, and a relative who died years ago. Out of what stock is all this built? Out of the impressions of whatever came in through those nineteen doorways during the day. That is why this consuming is called pravivikta, separated out, sorted, fine. In waking we consume things. In dream we consume the mark they left behind.
The stock comes out of the day, and it is always used in ways the day never used it. A staircase out of a building left behind thirty years ago rises inside a house nobody ever lived in. A voice belonging to one person comes out of the face of another and is accepted without a flicker of protest. The dead walk in, sit down, and nobody present finds this worth a remark. Nothing shows up there that did not first come in through the eyes or the ears, and nothing shows up there in the arrangement it came in by. The workshop takes whole objects in and gives them back cut apart and rejoined. That is what pravivikta points at, material lifted out of its setting and made fine enough to build with a second time.
The name is Taijasa, formed from tejas, belonging to light. That one word catches the strangest fact about dreaming. No lamp is burning outside during a dream, and still day breaks there, faces are visible, colors are present. Whose light is it? His own. Awareness here becomes the thing that shows and the thing shown, both at once. In waking this stays hidden, because the sun is there and the credit is easy to hand over. In dream that excuse is taken away, and awareness is caught alone in a light of its own.
This is why the Upanishad makes dream the middle rung. On the first rung the world looks external to us and looks extremely solid. On the second rung that same experience, feeling every bit as true, stands up with nothing external holding it. Inside a dream the doubt never crosses us even once that any of it is manufactured. If fear comes, the heart really does pound. If we run, the breath really does give out. On waking it all turns to vapor, and what is left over is the one who was watching.
Something else is worth noticing. The man of the dream and the man of the waking day are one and the same. No exchange took place anywhere in between. The one who went to the office yesterday is the one who stood last night on the roof of a flying house, and he is the one who will ask for tea in the morning. The name is one in all three places, the memory is one. The Upanishad takes hold of this thread of sameness and carries us to the third rung, where there is no outer world and no inner one.
In short: the second quarter is Taijasa, whose awareness turns inward and who feeds on the day’s impressions. No outside lamp burns in a dream and everything is still visible, so the name given belongs to light. This is the rung where it becomes plain that a whole experience can stand up with nothing external underneath it.
The third quarter: deep sleep, where no desire is left
The fifth mantra gives the definition first and the name afterward. “Yatra supto na kanchana kamam kamayate”, where the sleeper desires no desire whatever and sees no dream whatever, that is deep sleep. The definition is built out of two denials, and the denials are exact. No desire, which means no lack is being felt at all. No thing seen, which means there is nothing there to place in front. A man who needed a hundred things all day becomes, for a few hours, a creature with no demand left in him.
After that the mantra hands over the name and the marks. There everything has become one, he is a packed mass of knowing, he is made of bliss, he consumes bliss, and his mouth is awareness itself. “Prajnana-ghana evanandamayo hy ananda-bhuk”, he is the solid mass of knowing and the consumer of bliss, and his name is Prajna, and this is the third quarter. The word ghana, mass, is a beautiful one. In waking, knowing stays cut into pieces: this was known, that was known, this one slipped away. In deep sleep that partition is gone and knowing lies gathered into itself, like a lump of salt that tastes the same wherever you break it.
The matter of bliss is no piece of imagination; it has come out of our ordinary experience. Every man in the world, whether he owns a great deal or owns nothing, says after deep sleep that the sleep was good. The one with a palace and the one with a reed mat arrive at that same place and become equal there. No relative is there, no debt, no name. The Upanishad lays its hand on exactly this evidence: if happiness came from getting hold of something, then why is the deepest happiness found in the one place where there is nothing at all to get.
The return is the part worth examining, because the return is the only evidence anybody has. A man surfaces from that depth and lies there a second or two with nothing yet attached to him. No date. No debt. No idea which room this is or which city, sometimes not even which decade. Then it all comes back in a rush and fits itself into place, and he is himself again with everything of his own hung back on him. In that second before the fitting, something was present and had nothing to be present to. And when the rest of it arrives, the report he gives is that he slept well and knew nothing, and a man who truly knew nothing would have nothing at all to report.
The sixth mantra says things about this Prajna that startle a reader. This is the lord of all, this is the knower of all, this is the inner ruler, this is the womb of everything, and the arising and the dissolving of beings both happen from here. “Esha sarveshvarah”, this is the lord of all, it says, and the sentence goes on to call him the knower of all and the inner ruler. Why is deep sleep given a rank that high? Because everything is kept gathered up there. The man who went to sleep at night having forgotten it all finds his entire world standing again in the morning in the same order, the same name, the same worries, the same relations. Somewhere it was all being held safe.
And right here the limit of this quarter opens up as well. Whatever is a womb has a seed in it. In deep sleep the world is not destroyed; it settles down as seed, and that is why it sprouts every morning. Deep sleep is therefore rest, a halt on the way. A man who sleeps twenty hours wakes no freer than before, because although lack may go unfelt there, knowing does not know itself. For this reason the Upanishad refuses to stop at three. It counts the three states and then moves toward the fourth, and there its very language changes.
In short: the third quarter is Prajna, where there is no desire and nothing seen, where knowing lies gathered into a single mass. The Upanishad goes so far as to call this the lord of all and the womb of all, because the whole world stays held there as seed. Where a seed lies a sprout follows, so this is a halt on the way, and the journey continues.
The fourth: the one that looks neither inward nor outward
The seventh mantra is the heart of this Upanishad, and it opens its case with denials. Not aware of the inward, not aware of the outward, not aware of both, no mass of awareness, not aware, not unaware. Six times the word na is spoken, and each time a place is shut where the mind wanted to go and sit down. The three marks handed out in the previous three mantras are taken away here by name, and along with them two further roads are closed: this is no sum of the two, and this is no inertness.
That last denial is the most necessary of them all. If the mantra had only said that there is no knowing there, anyone at all would have taken it for unconsciousness. So in the same breath the mantra adds that it is aprajna no more than it is prajna. There is no twoness of a knower and a thing known there, and there is light there. This is the place language cannot touch, because language is a bridge thrown between two things, and there is no second thing there.
The claim to a fourth has to be earned, because three states look like a finished set and a fourth can seem an addition nobody asked for. The ground of the claim is small and it will not go away. Waking ends, and something carries word of it across into dream. Dream ends, and something carries word of it across into waking, which is how a man can describe over breakfast a road he walked along that was never built. Deep sleep ends, and something carries word of that as well, a report of having known nothing, which no instrument inside deep sleep could have filed, since nothing there was in operation. Three conditions arrive and depart, one witness is present at every arrival and every departure, and none of the three carries that witness off with it when it goes. “Nantah-prajnam na bahish-prajnam”, not inwardly aware, not outwardly aware. What stands present through all three and belongs to none of them cannot be counted in among the three. The Upanishad finds the fourth at the joints between the states, which is where the evidence for it lies out in the open.
After the denials the mantra gives six adjectives, all of them beginning with a. Adrishta, which cannot be seen. Avyavaharya, with which no dealing can be done. Agrahya, which does not come into a grip. Alakshana, which carries no mark. Achintya, which cannot be thought. Avyapadeshya, which cannot be pointed out to somebody else. These six describe the plain build of a thing that can never become the object of any instrument, because every instrument rises up from inside it.
And then, after all that care, the mantra says yes in four words. Ekatmapratyayasara, whose essence is the awareness of one self. Prapanchopashama, where the spreading out grows quiet. “Shantam shivam advaitam chaturtham manyante”, peaceful, benign, without a second, this is what they consider the fourth. The word shiva here is no god’s name; it carries its old plain sense, auspicious, full of well-being. And at the end comes the sentence that closes the mantra: that is the self, that is what is to be known.
One thing should stay clear here. In the mula the name of this fourth is chaturtha, the fourth, and the mula never once says turiya. Turiya is the usage of a later time, carrying the same sense, fourth by count. And this fourth does not lie beside the previous three as a fourth piece. Waking, dream and deep sleep come and they go; this does not go. It is present through all three and present in the joints between them. The way a snake is seen in a rope, and the rope once seen sends the snake nowhere at all, so here the three states do not come to an end; what ends is their standing apart as separate things.
In short: the seventh mantra says na six times over and shuts the door of every place the mind wanted to occupy, then gives six adjectives beginning with a to show that this comes into the grip of no instrument. At the end it says yes by calling it peaceful, benign and without a second, and adds that this is the self and this is what is worth knowing.
The measures are the quarters: a, u and m
The eighth mantra brings the Upanishad back to the place it set out from. That same self, seen as a syllable, is Om, and seen as measure it has its parts. “Pada matra matrash cha padah”, the quarters are the measures and the measures are the quarters, and they are a, u and m. That sentence runs in both directions, which is why it was said twice. One can travel from a state to a sound and from a sound to a state. A man without the patience to sit and watch his own states has at least a sound in his possession, and that sound will carry him to those very states.
The value of running the map in both directions is a practical one. Watching the states of a single night asks for long hours, a quiet room, and a kind of patience that a working weekday rarely leaves anybody. A syllable asks for one breath. The Upanishad sets the two on the same footing so that the door stays unlocked, and a man with nothing to spare except a breath has been handed a full entrance.
The ninth mantra takes the first measure and opens it in a strictly weighed manner. Vaishvanara of the waking state is the letter a, the first measure. The mantra then gives two grounds and joins them with va, either one of which may be taken. The first ground is apti, obtaining, pervading, because a is the sound spread through every spoken thing, and no word comes out at all without the throat opening. The second ground is adimattva, being first, because a stands first among the letters and waking stands first among the states.
And then the mantra gives two fruits set exactly level with those two grounds, and this is the real build of the mantra. “Apnoti ha vai sarvan kaman”, the one who knows in this way obtains all desires, and he becomes adi, the first among all. Notice how each fruit is fastened to its own ground. Obtaining came out of apti, and becoming first came out of adimattva. This is the arithmetic of the Upanishad itself, and shifting the pieces around breaks the frame of the mantra. The fruit of the first measure is obtaining, and going in front.
The tenth mantra repeats this same procedure on the second measure. Taijasa of the dream state is the letter u, the second measure, and the grounds are two: utkarsha, rising higher, and ubhayatva, standing between the two, because u falls exactly between a and m, as dream falls between waking and deep sleep. The fruits come out of those same two grounds. The one who knows in this way finds his current of knowledge rising, and he becomes samana, level. Rising came from utkarsha, and being level, equal on both sides, leaning to neither, came from ubhayatva. The mantra then adds one thing more, that in his line no man is born who fails to know brahman.
The eleventh mantra arrives at the third measure. Prajna of deep sleep is the letter m, the third measure, and the grounds are miti, measuring, and apiti, merging in. The way everything is weighed on a balance and comes out as one, and the way, while Om is being said, the whole sound merges inward the moment the lips close. The fruits are those same two. The one who knows in this way measures all of this, and he himself becomes the place into which everything merges. One single structure runs through all three mantras: two grounds, two fruits, and each time the clause about the one who knows in this way.
In short: the eighth mantra sets quarter and measure face to face and makes them one. Then the ninth, tenth and eleventh are cast in a single mold, two grounds for each measure and two fruits drawn straight from those grounds. The fruit of a is obtaining all desires and becoming first, of u the rising of the current of knowledge and becoming level, of m measuring everything and becoming the place of merging.
Amatra: the twelfth mantra and the silence after it
The twelfth mantra is very short and it gathers the entire account in one stroke. “Amatrash chaturtho’vyavaharyah”, the fourth is amatra, without measure, and no dealing can be done with it. It is that in which the spreading out grows quiet, it is shiva, it is without a second. The words of the seventh mantra come back here exactly as they were, spoken this time from the side of sound. Three measures have been spent, and the fourth stands as that within which all three rise and settle.
Say Om slowly and this becomes clear on its own. The throat opens, the voice rolls forward, the lips meet, and then a hum is left which keeps growing thinner, and then even that is gone. Where it has gone, something is still there, and that something is the silence. That silence is the ground on which the sound rose and into which it went back. Three measures can be measured. The fourth is the field on which measuring takes place.
The last portion of the mantra is the sentence on which this whole Upanishad completes itself. Om is this very self, and the one who knows in this way enters the self by the self. “Samvishaty atmana’tmanam ya evam veda”, he who knows in this way enters the self by the self. In that sentence the one who goes and the place he goes into are the same. Nobody arrives anywhere from anywhere, no new world is obtained, no door swings open. What was already one’s own, and was being hunted for outside, comes and sits down inside itself, in itself.
How tightly this building of twelve mantras is bound shows itself only at the end. The first mantra calls Om everything, the second gives the self four quarters, from three to seven the four quarters open out, from eight to twelve those same four are repeated from the side of sound, and the last word comes to rest again on the self. There is not one sentence in the middle that could be lifted away. It is this tightness that has made the shortest Upanishad the most read and the most chanted of them all.
In short: the twelfth mantra calls the fourth amatra, that which cannot be measured and with which no dealing is possible. When Om has been spoken and let go, the silence that remains is the ground of the sound. In the last sentence the one who travels and the place of arrival turn out to be one and the same.
And in the end, toward yourself
The largest generosity of this Upanishad is that it asked us to take up nothing new. Waking, dream and deep sleep will happen tonight as well, whether we read these mantras or leave them alone. This Upanishad says only that the coming and going of those three should be watched closely one time. At night before sleep, when sleep is arriving and has yet to arrive, stop for one moment on that thin doorsill. In the morning as the eyes open, just before the name and the date and the worries start coming back, recognize that empty instant. In the whole day these are the two places where the joint shows itself bare.
The second thing belongs to ordinary dealing. A man who comes to see that what he had taken for his entire world is one portion out of four finds his grip loosening. Defeat and victory belong to that one portion. Work does not become less on account of this; work goes on the same way, and what leaves it is the clench that turns every small matter into a question of life and death. This Upanishad tells nobody to leave home. It sets the proportion right and leaves the rest alone.
There is a third place, harder to catch than those two and worth the trouble. It arrives in the middle of an ordinary waking day. A thought finishes and the next has yet to come, and for a fraction of a second the hand is empty. Most of that gap gets filled before anyone can look into it, because the next thing is already pressing forward. Slow down once and the gap becomes findable, and it has the same taste as the doorsill at night and the empty instant at dawn. Those gaps lie scattered through every hour. Nothing has to be arranged for them and nothing has to be believed about them. They are already happening.
And the third thing belongs to that sound, the easiest of all. While saying Om there is no need to finish it off quickly. Feel the throat opening, the voice rolling forward, the lips meeting, and then that hum which keeps growing thinner. When even that has left, do not get up from there and start the next piece of work at once. Whoever stays one moment in that place knows these twelve mantras better than reading them can teach, because what the Upanishad is pointing toward is standing in that silence, and it is standing there no distance at all from the reader.
Source: Mandukya Upanishad, mantras 1 to 12; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.