THE FOUR STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS🔗

A Zen Master woke up from bed and started weeping. His disciples were perplexed. Zen Masters are unpredictable. Their ways of teaching are mysterious, untraditional. One disciple, a chief disciple asked, 'Why are you weeping?' The Master said, 'Last night I dreamt that I was a butterfly and flying in the garden.' The disciple asked, 'It was just a dream. Why are you crying?' The Master said, 'I do not know whether I dreamt that I became a butterfly or whether the butterfly is now dreaming that it is a Master with so many disciples.'

Both thoughts were transient, not permanent! But do we understand? We always think that whatever we are is permanent. We try to possess it, identify with it.

We have 4 states: waking, dreaming, deep sleep and thoughtless awareness. If we understand these states, we can live more joyfully. There are two states of mind and two states of consciousness overlapping to create 4 states in all.

In the waking state, we are with thoughts and I consciousness. In Sanskrit this is called jagrat.

In deep sleep we have no thought; we have no I consciousness. This is shushupti in Sanskrit.

While dreaming, we have only thoughts but no I consciousness. We may think of ourselves in very many different forms. Once we think of 'I', we come out of the dream! As soon as you feel you are dreaming you will wake up. In Sanskrit this is called swapna.

There is a fourth state where there are no thoughts but we know who we are!

Every student of spirituality needs to understand these states. These are different layers of our Being. In jagrat you use the physical layer body. In dream state - swapna, you see your subtle body, sukshma sharira. You may be sleeping in LA (Los Angeles), but see yourself in India with your parents. You are using your subtle body. The third body is karana sharira that is used in deep sleep. These three are the conscious, sub conscious and unconscious states.

Whatever is unfulfilled in conscious state, anything you suppress is brought back in yourdream or the sub conscious state. If you fast, you dream of feasting! If you are afraid of snakes and suppress thoughts of them in the conscious state, you will dream of snakes. Your suppressed anger, hidden fears, violence or sexual desires will come out in dreams. In the unconscious deep sleep or karana sharira, your mind is processing

All that you see but don't record or your mind thinks is not useful to you goes into the unconscious. What is recorded is based on your mental conditioning. In a house we all live in one place but not together. After the honey moon, the husband and wife do not live with each other. They live only with the idea that each one has of the other. Each looks at the other through the mental conditioning one forms of the other and judges through that conditioning.

The fourth state is where there is no thought but only I consciousness - the awakened state! Each religion has its own different concepts about how to lead one's life; but they all agree on one thing: Man is asleep. All Masters agree. What does this mean? Buddha says: you dream when you are awake. You don't have to fall asleep to dream. You will day dream even when you are awake. In olden days a town crier went around waking people beating a drum and shouting. Such a man in Janaka's court who was enlightened said: wake up not only from your sleep and dreams, wake up from your waking state, your desires, your mind. He cried: jagrat, jagrat, wake up, wake up.

Masters caution you to wake up even from your awakened state. The state where you do not day dream is the awakened state, the enlightened state, the fourth state, where you are in consciousness but without thoughts, dreams and desires. This is like a sky without any clouds or stars, it's pure space. In this state there is pure consciousness. In Sanskrit it is called turiya or Samadhi.

Some people experience this while meditating in our LBP / ASP classes: as if they have lost all thoughts but still awake. When you reach this state forever, you become Buddha, the awakened one. Ramana says: a man who is not enlightened is like a man in a dream, going in and out of dreams. Till you are enlightened you do not know what really life is. Till then, you see what you want to see, not what IS. You just pick a few things from reality and claim to see reality. This is what Sankara means when he says that the whole world is maya. Maya is that which is not there. You are seeing what is not, that's maya.