"Soham"

Early every morning, my grandmother or mother, would draw 'Rangoli' on our doorstep.
We as children, still not fully awake, would sit on the steps yawning, and observing the intricate shapes materialise from the thin stream of the 'rangoli' powder flowing between their thumb and fore finger. The patterns they drew, though from memory, were quite intricate. Some times they would be straight geometric, and at others curvaceous. Some times they would first create a grid, and at other times they would do without one. If they felt particularly happy, they would draw a curvaceous stem with a couple of leaves and a lovely flower. Sometimes the flower would be a rose, at other times it would be a "Jaswand", and some times off course a purely imaginary one. The rangolis were rarely coloured, even when they were, they were done so, with only light colours used sparingly. After the drawing had been accomplished, they would invariably write a word or phrase below the 'Rangoli', most of the times it would be an invocation to the various Hindu deities, but some times a phrase like “Soham” or “Om Tat Sat”, would be written. We convent educated brats hardly had an inkling of the profundity of it's meaning. I, once asked my grandmother, what it meant, the answer she gave, is still fresh in my mind. She explained that every thing around us was part of a whole, and that whole was itself Brahma (The Creator Himself). The whole "Cosmos" was "Bramhand" and "Brahma" and "Brahmand" are one and the same. She then told us the rationale of not inflicting pain on
any thing animate or inanimate, human or otherwise, as it would be like hurting oneself. She said that was the reason we did 'namaskar' (an obeisance), when accidentally our feet touched someone, or something as inanimate as a book, as that namaskar was not meant for that person,
or thing, but to the divinity within. This was in essence the philosophy of "Advaita"

Interestingly though Western Philosophy is 'materialistic' and 'dualistic', this concept of 'oneness' pops out sometimes through their literature. An example that comes to my mind is the poem
by Jone Donne,
"No man is an island, entire of itself .
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.",
which was immortalised, when Hemmingway used the line “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, as a title for his lovely book.

In today's world, if we revert to the old teachings of "Oneness", We for sure, will all come out, winners.