Center on the sound ‘aum’ without any ‘a’ or ‘m’.
- AUM is a fusion of three distinct sounds, A + U + M. Intone it continuously and train the ear to hear all three separately within the single composite — a rare, delicate capacity. Suited to those with already-sensitive hearing (musicians, poets); others must first train the ear (Zen method: months beside a river / under wind in trees, catching every shifting nuance and mood). Without a trained ear the technique cannot be done.
- Once A and M can be distinguished, drop them; only the middle sound U remains. But the real aim is NOT the letter U — it is the microscopic attentiveness required to reach that point.
- Pure indirection: sustaining such fine-grained focus is incompatible with ordinary thinking — the mind goes so deep into the sound that it falls out of thought. (Like the Zen koan ‘the sound of one hand’: unsolvable, but the earnest search for it cultivates pure, objectless attention.)
- The nine-year-old boy: too simple to dismiss the koan as absurd, he tried every sound for months until his sensitivity ripened and one day everything dropped — ‘I have heard it, but it is soundlessness.’ His very simplicity was the method; the adult intellect says ‘impossible’ and refuses to try.
- End-state sequence: A drops, M drops, U drops — then the meditator himself drops — leaving only soundlessness. Not just the mantra gone, but the one who was intoning it: the newborn-buddha state.