Hari Om Tat Sat is a very ancient mantra which occurs in the Vedas. ‘Hari Om’ is one mantra and ‘Om Tat Sat’ is another one. I have joined both of them in ‘Hari Om Tat Sat’. Hari represents the manifest universe and life. Om represents the unmanifest and absolute reality. When I use the word ‘reality’, I mean total existence. You may even use the word God, I do not mind. Reality, existence, God, Brahman, absolute, they are all synonymous terms, pointing at one thing, but they do not really define that thing.
This reality has two stages. One is called absolute, the other is manifest. This gross universe, millions and millions of suns, moons and stars, space, and things beyond them and beyond this little earth, as far as we can go, all these things are the manifestations of that reality. It is not creation; you must make it very clear in your mind. There is a difference between the process of creation and manifestation. You take cotton and you make yarn and then a shirt. The cotton has become a shirt, the cotton has not created a shirt. The cotton has transformed itself into a shirt. In the same way, there is a great force which is invisible. Excepting a few who have gone very high, nobody can know it, nobody can see it, and nobody has known it or seen it. One who has seen it has definitely gone beyond and can never live with us. It is not possible except for a few people whom we call avatars.
The manifest reality, this world, is represented by the mantra Hari. Om is unmanifest reality, the unseen, invisible, the uncreated or the absolute. Hari Om Tat Sat means ‘that is truth’. That is my personal feeling: that what I see with my eyes and what is beyond my eyes are both the same, they are not different. The creator and the creation are not two. The creator has manifested himself into creation. He has not created a creation, but he has manifested or transformed himself into creation.
All these truths which I am talking about are represented in the mantra ‘Hari Om Tat Sat’. When I say ‘Hari Om Tat Sat’, it reminds me that the seen and the unseen are one.
10 February 1983, Caxton Hall, London