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Om and Aum 

 

         One often encounters the teaching that the proper pronounciation of Om is Aum, and that there are three distinct sounds.  I consulted a Sanskrit scholar, who informed me that in actuality, the Sanskrit symbol for om consists in a combination of two vowels, A () and U ().  When two vowels are juxtaposed in Sanskrit, they are combined.  There is a dot over the combination, called an anusvara, which gives the ‘m’ sound to any letter it is over.  Here a+u becomes both o and au, the first sounding like the o in poke, the au sounding like ow in cow.  Om ()is generally pronounced like the ‘o’ in poke.  My feeling is that both pronunciations are acceptable, and probably have variant spiritual purposes.  To be consistent with this website, we use the ‘o’ sound.  (There are also ‘om’ and ‘aum’ sounds associated with two of the sixteen petals of the lotus of Vishuddhi Chakra, the throat chakra.  One petal is inscribed with ‘o’ () 

another with ‘au’ (), both sanskrit vowels, in this case each with an anusvara.  With the anusvara, the symbols for ‘om’ and ‘aum’ are seen below:) 

 

 

 

 

 

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