Last week, a family member passed away. While we came together to celebrate the tremendous impact of his life, death always hurts.
Death also always makes me contemplate three things:
1. The privilege of community;
2. Whether I’ve sufficiently upskilled my children at life so they’ll be OK if I died tomorrow; and
3. Hinduism.
All three of these things – community, debilitating anxiety and religion – are gifts from my family.
I know it’s not cool to talk about religion. Throughout human history, we’ve used it to justify mass murder, colonisation and its related crimes. But I want to talk about it – in particular the Hindu mantra “Sohum” that my parents gave me. In this fractured and frightening world, the mantra calls me. I’ve spent 87,502 words in my new manuscript exploring it (spoiler alert: my new manuscript is obviously not about sexy dragon riders).
Sohum means “I am that.” It means I am divine. The word signifies oneness with the universal divine – I am one with the ultimate reality.
My parents taught us Sohum as part of our meditation training. When I say “training” I am understating my parents’ admirable efforts, and I am overstating the outcome of these efforts on me.
I was a poor student of Hinduism and a very distractible child. But for years, Appa would call me and my little brother to the family shrine and ask us to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of a lamp. He instructed us to focus on the flame, bring the light into our minds, close our eyes, and breathe slowly and deeply.
Naturally, my mind would turn to last week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica and my father, sensing the energy shift in the room, asked us to empty our minds of all thoughts and feelings.
He gently instructed us to synchronise our breath with the repetition of the word Sohum. I can hear his voice: “Breathe in – So. Hold. Breathe out – Hum. Breathe in – So. Hold. Breathe out – Hum.”
Sohum.
Appa told us this daily exercise would help us connect with our inner divinity. He said inside our bodies, there is a divine energy, that also exists around us. It is everywhere and in everything. Most importantly, it is in everyone.
Amma added to this lesson. She taught us that our code in life is to live in this world with generosity and kindness, but to realise that we are not really of this world. Our deeper purpose is to shed its constraints and understand our shared divinity.
When Hindus meet each other, we fold our hands together. People see this as a respectful greeting, but it is much more than that. It signifies the divinity in one person recognising the divinity in the other. This is the meaning held but often forgotten within that powerful gesture. It isn’t a “hello” – it’s a salutation between the divinity that exists in all things.
And that is why this lesson from my parents has become so important to me, more than four decades after they tried to teach it to us.
If I am not really me, but a divine energy, and you are not really you, but the same divine energy, then by deduction, you and I are one.
I want to say that out loud again, because when I let it guide my thoughts and interactions, I am a much better person.
You and I are one.
All of us belong to different tribes that give us identity, meaning, stories about our past and stories about our place in the world. We love our tribes because they offer protection and belonging. These are good things. But tribalism also hurts us. In some cases it destroys us.
I try hard to remember the lesson from our parents.
Sohum.
In this fractured world, we are more than our different tribes. We are deeply connected to each other, whether we can sense it yet or not. We are connected, we are equal and we are one.
• Shankari Chandran is a Miles Franklin award-winning author of the books Safe Haven and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens
