Wk 01*** Sound of God

When I was a young child, I heard a sound. I did not recognize the sound, or understand the sound, or even know what made the sound. Sometimes I was frightened by the sound, and at other times I found it peaceful. The sound I heard was the sound of God, “Om”, which when chanted sounds like “Ooaaammm”. “Om is the universal name of the Lord.” (See http://www.saranam.com/). I didn’t know it was the sound of God until I was seventeen years old and I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, a book recommended by my Hippie friends. To learn more about God, my friends and I would visit a local commune of Hari Krishna’s and we would join in the practice of Transcendental Meditation, sitting in a full lotus position and chanting Om.

In the commune I recognized the name of Om, and His sound, from my childhood. My father had been desperate to teach me everything about Om in hope I would grow up to become a master electrician like him. Dad’s Om was spelled “ohm” and had something to do with electricity, or energy, or the transmission of power, or something. Ohm was Dad’s God. Dad had a shop full of electric toys, or tools, that he used to fix televisions, radios, telephones, appliances, air conditioners, motors, Christmas trains and lights, and a whole bunch of other stuff that filled our basement.

My favorite toy was an oscilloscope. Dad’s oscilloscope was built in the 1940’s or 50’s and only slightly resembled the modern one pictured here. His scope had a bunch of glass vacuum tubes in the back that lit up like Christmas lights which hummed the sound of ohm. The scope’s screen displayed an image of ohm, not the oscilloscope’s ohm, but the ohm of whatever broken appliance my dad connected to it. The image of ohm did not make any sound, unless a tube was about to blow, but the image showed what the ohm of the broken appliance looked like. The image represented sine waves, cosine, tangents and other stuff I did not understand. Seeing the image of ohm helped Dad fix the appliance.

The sound of ohm is very familiar. Ohm, or Om, is in everything. You hear Om all the time without noticing it, but when it touches you, or otherwise catches your attention, you recognize it right away; after all, it is the sound of God. It can scare the daylights out of you if you are not expecting its sound. It penetrates your ears and gets into your head. This happened to me almost every time my dad was connecting appliances to the oscilloscope. The sound of ohm would pulse throughout the house, and then all the lights would go out and Dad would yell “God d__n it!”

One time I heard the sound of God up close and personal. I was plugging in the electric motor of an Erector Set for the first time and my fingers made contact with the prongs. Ohm traveled up my arm and towards my heart. I yelled something to God, and His image of sine waves and Christmas lights flashed in my head. His sound rang inside my ears, and I passed out. I never played with the Erector Set again; and I never considered a career in the electrical trade. Sorry, Dad.