Ask people, “What sounds do you make when you are feeling YES — when you taste or smell something utterly delicious, receive a perfect touch, or listen to music you love?” You’ll hear a chorus of sounds like “Mmmmmm,” “Aaaahhhh” and “Ooh.” These are the sounds of yes — Oh and MM and AHH and UUU — rising spontaneously in your heart. And this is where mantras come from.

The Chandogya Upanishad, which dates to perhaps 500 B.C., talks about OM as the sound of yes. The Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary describes OM as indicating “affirmation and assent, sometimes translated as Yes, verily, so be it. — OM consists of a, u, and m and is usually called pranava.” Pra=before, forward, + nava=sound, shout, exult.* Exult in turn is “to feel or show great happiness, lively and triumphant joy.” Modern equivalents to “Yes, verily,” would be OH YEAH!, YAY, and even, HELL YEAH! OM is a sound we can say, chant, and meditate on.

If you’ve lost that OMMing feeling, return to your yes. What creates in you the spontaneous rising of pranava, your shout of exuberance?

The deeper OM, the real OM, is the sound of existence itself, joyously shouting, reverberating everywhere across the universe.

*this etymology of pranava is from Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University, and can be found in his Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom, State University of New York Press (2008).