AUM · ॐ · the syllable and the fourth

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, twelve verses long, does something no other text on this bench does: it takes a single syllable apart and finds the whole of reality inside it. A is waking, U is dream, M is deep sleep — and then there is the fourth, turīya, which is the silence the syllable dissolves into, and which is not a sound at all. Tehiru already holds this shape twice. The 42-letter Name runs seven lines, and the app renders the eighth as silence. The four letters of the Name are the four worlds — and the Name is not pronounced. Two traditions, no contact, both building a four-fold holy sound whose fourth part cannot be said aloud. Of everything on this door, this is the rhyme least likely to be coincidence and least possible to be borrowing.