Twelve Verses, Four States, Three Sounds

The text works by a double mapping and it is over almost before it starts. The self is described in four conditions: awake and turned outward, dreaming and turned inward, in deep sleep where there is no division and no desire, and then a fourth that is not a state alongside the others but what the other three are conditions of. The syllable Om is then divided into its three sounds and each is matched to one of the first three conditions, with the silence that follows the syllable corresponding to the fourth.

The economy of that is the point. Rather than argue for the identity of the self and the absolute, the text gives a procedure: attend to the syllable you already recite, notice that it has parts, notice that you have states, and see that the two analyses are one analysis. Nothing is asserted that the reader is not shown how to check. The fourth condition is deliberately underdescribed. The text names it by a number rather than by any quality, and characterises it mainly by negation, refusing every description that would turn it into a further item on the same list. That reticence is what later commentary had to work with, and it is a large part of why so much was built on so short a text: twelve verses that decline to say what the most important term means leave a great deal of room for an interpreter, and the tradition filled it.