All life, animate or inanimate objects, visible or invisible, coexists in the waking state. Everyone and everything appear for a moment and disappears – we call this phenomenon. So the question is, where did the phenomenon disappear to, and how would the phenomenon know it? Do you see the waking state? Can the mind conceive of the waking state?
No, the mind is part of the waking state. We usually confuse the Mind with Consciousness.
The states of consciousness don’t begin. What time did your dream start? All we know was when the dream was there; there was infinite time. That world that was appearing stretched back, beginning, lost time, beginning, lost future. It appeared at once as soon as the dream came. But we say when the dream came, the waking state was canceled. as soon the waking appeared the dream was canceled.
So the appearance and disappearance, the states are not in a time when the waking appears. So we can finalize; time is irrelevant to consciousness!
Time can’t be real, just like a dream and the dream world it is only real as long as it appears. To see that as soon as the dream came – my waking was in the same way – canceled. If you look at the dream from the waking bias, the dream is a creation of the waking mind.
If you look at it from the point of view impartially, what’s the experience? Then we can see that the states are appearing and disappearing. I’m aware of something, and then I’m unaware of something. As soon as I am aware of something, I call it waking when the dream appears. I call it waking. In fact, to call a state a dream is just a bias from the mono-basic waking point of view. Waking and dreams are exactly alike. Two dreams appear, and they cancel each other. They’re objects—the whole state. The illustration has a circle as though there’s a line around the phenomenon. It may be misleading; every objective thing in this phenomenon is an object to you as the Subject. And this Subject is not the Subject in my mind. It’s the witness of the whole phenomenon. Everyone can see easily; I think they witness their dreams. Who does the dream appear to? It’s easy to assume that the waking ego. But when the dream appears, the waking ego is gone.
Who does it appear to? Does it appear to the ego that’s in the dream? Does the dream state appeal to the ego that appears in the dream, or is the Subject in the dream? His senses and the world that he sees and all that. All of that is an object to you. You are the Subject of the whole dream. That dream has no existence apart from you. Why is that? Because when the dream ends, no dreamworld remains.
In other words, the states don’t disappear to the ego. It’s in this state because the ego in the state is an object – it disappears to you, the Subject. That Subject is witnessing the dream. It’s always the same Subject. It’s aware of the Woke Ego even though the states appear and disappear and cancel each other equally. The Super Self is conscious of their presence and absence. Because the states still know that they’ve gone. When the waking is gone, and the dream is gone. We call that deep sleep.
Based on intuition, we can see that consciousness, which objectifies the states, remains unaware of anything. The way we know the states is called intuition. You don’t perceive the state. You can’t conceive of the state because all perception and conception are in this state. But the whole phenomenon that’s appearing to you. You see it directly. Immediately. That which is aware of the presence in the absence of the state is not in time. It never changes. All the changes are happening in waking. Changes appear to be happening in a dream. Those changes disappear.
Consciousness was never born. It doesn’t go through any modifications. All of that is in the States. The Three States of consciousness are akin to waves on an ocean. Anything other than the ocean is an object, mere appearance. Except, of course, the ocean is an endless Subject.
It’s the waking Self that appears in the waking state. It was the only reality there. The consciousness that lit up the state – permeated the state. The states can’t occur without consciousness. They have no independent existence, and the world in the states even less. Once you see the world is in this state, and this state is an object to you, the whole phenomenon. And that is just an appearance, like a dream, because it appears and disappears.
The waking state appears in disappears. When I use language, it sounds like the waking state appears at a particular point. But in fact, the time is concomitant with the state, but the state is not in time – It’s just an appearance. It appeared. But in truth, it was just the Self. The dream appeared, but there was no dream or dream world. If you take the consciousness away, what happens to dreams and waking? How we know the states. It is called intuition. The reason why the word intuition is tricky is that the English language means different from Sanskrit. The word intuition has many connotations. “In Sanskrit, called “Anubhava” to cognize the states and to know them: to aggregate and assimilate the various decisions or conclusions drawn from that intuition to determine the Truth or Reality we have reasoning or discrimination, called Yukli.”
Anubhava (Skt., ‘experience’). In Vedānta, ‘experience’ or ‘intuition’ is the basis of an individual’s knowledge of Brahman, the Absolute. For Śaṅkara brahman –anubhava, the ‘intuition of Brahman, ‘is the ultimate experience—impersonal, transcendental, and abstract.
How do we know the thoughts? How do we know the emotions? Do they know themselves? Objects or subjects. I am happy. I am sad. I see the tree—that thought. I see the tree. Does that thought know itself? Or is it an object that appeared in consciousness? How does consciousness know the thoughts? The thoughts are just the mind. How does consciousness know the mind? Because the mind is an object of consciousness. It appears, in fact, in the waking state, the waking mind. It’s stuck in the waking state. We think the waking mind passes through three states of consciousness. We have three things that need to be clarified. Let me boil it down to two.
I was born. I’m now I am 66 years of age. I’m going to get sick, and I’m going to die. I am awake of these facts, and I had a dream that I slept are all misconceptions. The Self – who you are is the witness of the three states of consciousness. The worlds are in the States. You are timeless consciousness because the object that’s appearing is time itself. There’s a time when time doesn’t appear. What time did deep sleep begin? Time can’t sneak its way into a deep sleep. How long did we sleep? Is there time in deep sleep? Suppose there’s no time in deep sleep. It can’t be a state. What is deep sleep? When the waiting is not appearing, and the dream is not occurring. What is deep sleep? It is yourself. Whether the waking appears or disappears, the dream appears or disappears. Or all the people appearing in waking are scientists, yogis, mystics, and artists. But my nature is unchanging, pure consciousness beyond time and space and causation. I never change.
That’s why I’m the only reality.
Ultimately, that which changes can’t be real, and that which is real can never change – by examining your experience of the three states. In your own experience, you can intuit the fact. Not a religious belief, not a mystical state, not a blind faith, not because some yogi said it to some guy with our courts pronounced it because some prophet revealed it.
Based on your own experience, you can realize that yourself is the unchanging reality. And when you realize this fact. Then there will be nobody who could ever contradict them because those people are in the waking state and are part of an object. There is no second thing when you realize the Self. There’s a saying in this teaching. “This is he who sees himself.” And all beings in himself. He is wise amongst men. What does that mean? He who sees himself. It’s like, say, he who sees in the waves, the water. And he who sees the water in the waves as though there are two things, water, and waves. But what that means is that there’s only water. Would you call the wave water? The wave has no existence apart from water. The waking state can’t exist apart from your consciousness. It appears in consciousness. It abides in consciousness. If you take the consciousness away, which you can’t, you can’t even imagine the absence of consciousness. You can imagine the absence of the world. But that imagination has to take place in consciousness. By the way. Okay. All right.
So let me sum it up.
What is reality? The answer becomes available based on your experience rather than some guru with some scripture or other things. You can realize this fact here and now through this examination. So this is the, and no other philosopher or religion looks at, the states. Everyone is suspended in waiting. Jesus came into the waking world, the prophets and saints. But to see the whole thing in the waking and dismiss it as equal to a dream. This viewpoint is the unique teaching of the three states.
When we examine those three states, there’s no other state to be reviewed. And by looking at these three states, we can realize that the only reality is me.
There are no three states. All three states are not something different than me. So you can come to realize that there’s nothing other than me. So how is this? Let me repeat a couple of other facts. One is that when we examine the waking state.
There are two ways to look at the waking state – I am awake, and I’m aware of a world that exists independently of me, And when I dream, I’m not aware of that world that still exists independently of me in a deep sleep. So, I don’t know anything. But the world is still there. And when I wake up. I once again will wear the world that exists. And this world existed long before I came. And it will exist long after I’m gone. So the world exists before the state.
A waking state is an event in the waking world.
That’s how we all experience the waking state, and I appeared in that waking world, which has existed for time immemorial. And I’m having a waking dream and deep sleep in the world. To realize this viewpoint is to take my experience of the waking state as a reality. And that dream is just the private imagination that nobody else is aware of. The waking world is common to all of you people. So it’s not my private imagination and deep sleep.
I am not aware of the world at that time, but the bed that I’m sleeping on and the world that is there that I once again perceive are the same when I wake up. That world is the real world. And in that world, people are born. They get all sick and die, and the world continues independent of them and misstates the waking mind. So the mind that’s in the waking is the thing that’s in the waking world. And there’s the waking mind that imagines the dream. And when it stops functioning, it’s in a deep sleep. So now I want to say that. This idea is based on the idea that waking is actual, and the dream is false. And deep sleep is just a state of unconsciousness if you give up your bias and look at this state from your experience.
You see. The teaching says that you will attain immortality when you know the Self.
You will be free from birth and death. But in the waking state, all bets are off. This teaching seems impossible because of the so-called saints and sages, the Buddha, Jesus, and Shankara. They were all born. They all were here for a moment. And they’ve all gone. No one ever became immortal. So this teaches that when you know the absolute truth, you become immortal. It’s ridiculous because they’ve all died. Nobody attained immortality. So how can we believe that there is such a thing as when you know your true nature, achieving immortality? So how can this knowledge bring about immortality when it hasn’t brought mortality to any? Birth and death exist in the empirical sense; having reached Atman, it stops.
You were never born; thus, you cannot die.
Birth and death are from the viewpoint that we take the waking state as the natural state, and the world that appears in this state is the real world. But what is the experience? Once again. I don’t have to argue; I don’t think with anybody. When the dream appears, the dream world comes. As soon as the dream came, there was the dream time, dream space, and dream people. They saw the same things that I saw: the same laws of causation of objects and subjects and sentiment and incentives. Mysticism, rebirth, and magic all appeared in the dream.
And when the dream ended, the dream world didn’t continue to exist anywhere. The dream world came with the dream state. It’s everyone’s experience. No one felt that when my dream ended. The dream world that was appearing in that dream continued to exist. But the waking state is soon as my waking appears. It appears in the—waking world. Before the waking state, no waking world appeared in a deep sleep. There was no waking world in a dream. There was no waking world. When the waking appeared, the waking world appeared. And in that waking world were time, space, causation, and all the laws of nature. And there were wise people and ignorant people and so-called enlightened people. And enlightened people.
But there. Just like in a dream. Those in a dream. There are sages and people and saints and sinners. But they have no existence apart from dreams. What we have to see is that this state pervades the world without this state. There is no world – The world is in this state. He can’t get out of the way. The waking mind, the waking senses, the body, and the objects the senses perceive are all within that waking state. When the waking state is gone, nothing remains of that waking world.
In the same way, when the dream appears, the dream subject and the dream object in the dream body that he has had senses, and he sees the natural world and other people. The world was coming to the dream, people that saw it, and the distinction between real and unreal and everything I could imagine. All of that was in the dream. Even in the dream, I can imagine I had a dream last night. That’s also within the dream. And what’s important to see here is that the dream time, space, and causality are all within this state. The waking world. With this time and space, causality is in the waking state but between the waking state and the dream state. What time is it there? By which we could say first, there was waking. And then, later in time, there was a dream. It would make the states’ events in time. But if you can see the state as a whole, that appears. And the time is in the state, and you can realize that. The states are concurrent.
The common belief is in the waking stages – I am awake, and then at some time, I had a dream for a while, and then for some time, I slept. And then I woke up as though the three states were all in one-time series. But what’s the experience? By which you can say. First, there was waking, and then there were three. Because the states cancel each other, they don’t come in time when the dream time appears. The waking is canceled. When the waking appears, the dream time is canceled. The time is in the States, but the states are not in time. Things in the States can change over time. But the states themselves can only appear and disappear.
The state appears, and the world appears in this state. Let me tell you one crucial thing about this type of thinking. There’s a body – But the body is known to me. So what knows? The body’s senses are also known to me. So what knows the senses? Who’s the real knower? The senses can’t know anything without the mind. The mind knows the senses i.e., the eye—the ego knows the mind. I know my mind. And who is that ego? I am. Is that an object to you, or is that also is that the true knower, the eye good, or is there something that knows the eye? So if you say, yes, it is my Self, I am the one who objectifies even the ego. I’m the witness of the appearance of the ego, the mind, the senses, the body in the whole world, the fact I am the witness. And then you hear this teaching.
Oh, I am the witness of my ego. So I’m not the ego. I’m the witness of my mind to the mind and. But then the question is if I’m the witness of my mind. Why aren’t I the witness of everybody else’s mind?
I’m an individual witness who knows all of my thoughts, but others also have thoughts. And I’m not the witness is that? So there must be many witnesses as long as you’re waking. So you have this problem: Oh, I’m the witness of my mind. And whenever my mind thinks, I forget the witness. And now I’m trying to remember the witness. But my mind is so extroverted that I can’t seem to do it.
So even though I understand that I am the witness, I can’t understand how I can abide by that because my mind, which is an object to the witness, takes me away from it. And I can’t get rid of my mind because I’d have to be unconscious. So that would be no solution if I just become unconscious. Then the mind may return, and I’ll be in the same situation. The example above shows the whole problem of doing Vedanta from the waking point of view. Once you take it that my experience is the waking state. The whole state, just like the whole dream, appears to me. A waking state is an object to me. I’m the witness of the waking state. In which the waking world appears with the waking mind and senses and body and objects in time and space and laws and imaginations and creations and poems and saints and sinners.
They’re all in. But I’m the Witnessing consciousness of the whole state in which the world of time and space appears. And I am the witness to rule. It disappears. Now, you don’t have to be worried about identifying with your mind. Now you are the witness of the whole state. Time is an object. Space is an object. Now, this makes you the timeless, ever-present awareness.
A person can only appreciate this based on their own experience. So let me say a few words about the word experience. My experience when Vedanta when this teaching says, we have to base this on your own experience. What is the meaning of the word experience referred?
When I see things through my senses, we can call that sense experience. And I’m also able to know things that are not available to the senses, but through the mind, I can know things. For example, I am happy. The senses don’t objectify that. These, too, are qualities of the mind. We know them directly – They appear in the mind, so we don’t need the senses.
And the other thing is, when we see certain things with the senses, we can infer using the mind. The existence of other things that we don’t see through the senses. Such as if I see smoke. Through inference, I can infer there must be fire. That’s one type of experience. Why the experience of relying upon is there our senses? Do our senses reveal the waking state, or do the senses reveal the objects in the world that appear waking?
There’s the mind already in the waking world that’s subsumed in the waking state, in that know the waking state, or can it know only the things that are appearing in the waking state because itself is part of the waking world? How do we know the states? Let’s forget the waking state for a moment and ask, How do we know the dream? When the dream appears. And the dream world appears concomitantly with the dream. And then there’s the Subject. Me. And the world, the dream world, the object, and my senses and mind. The dream mind appeared in the dream state. The dream mind is like the waking, pure, waking state.
That dream mind. I can’t see the dream it sees. And the senses and the body. It sees the objects in the dream world but doesn’t see the whole dream. How do we see the dream? Is it? Through the eyes, through the mind? Or do we know it directly? With no means whatsoever, they appeared to us, and we objectified the whole dream as an object, with no mind or sense as we know it directly. Just like in the waking state when you did that business about this. The senses know the objects. The mind knows the senses, and the ego knows. And I am the witness of the ego.
Here I am, the witness. And how do you know the cat? How do you know the senses, the mind, and the ego? Do you know them? With the senses, With the mind, with the ego. Or do they all appear as objects to you immediately, directly? In that awareness, they appear. You don’t need any senses to objectify it. The way that we know the states that experience. It is to differentiate it from sense experience or mental experience. The word that we can use is intuition. We intuit the states, and we experience them directly with no need for any means of knowledge whatsoever. When they appear, they appear in the light of consciousness.
The consciousness lights up the whole state – the state can’t appear without consciousness. The world that appears in this state has no existence apart from the state, and the state has no existence apart from that consciousness. It can’t exist without that consciousness objectifying. But as soon as the waking appears, that dream world directly appearing in consciousness is sublimated along with the waking dream. My dream body. Dream time. Dream reality. Dream on reality. Dream Saints. Dream Centers. Dream Philosophers.
And the waking appears to. Not to the waking ego that appears in this state. We use the word intuition because we know it directly from the inside. We intuit it like, “How do you know your thoughts?”
You know them directly. They appear. How do you know they appear? They disappeared. And you know they’ve disappeared. That intuition by which we know the states.
It has to be understood that the experience in this state with my sense is in mind. But how do I know the states? Because if I’m the witness, if I’m the one that intuits the waking directly. I’m the same consciousness that intuits the dream. The two states are just appearances in consciousness.
When you say cancels, it doesn’t mean that. When one comes, the other remains somewhere. And that we go back to it. It means that when one appears, the other is entirely nonexistent. When the dream ends, the dream world is not existing anywhere. It’s sublimated by waking. What time did the waking appear? What time did your waking state appear to you? If the state appears in time or concomitant with the waking state, as well as the waking time and space. And you, as an individual in there, saying, I came from a deep sleep, I was sleeping, and now I woke up. But that’s just the waking point of view from the point of view of intuition. I witness both states, their appearance, and their disappearance. They have no relationship.
There is a Vedic parable of the rope and the snake. Like the States of consciousness, Atman is the Stick, and we mistake it for a snake.
Or is it the rope that appears as the snake? If you look at it that way, the snake is not the rope. The appearance is not the reality. But it’s not a second thing. Different from reality. The world is not something other than the Self. To say that it’s an appearance is to say that. It’s not a Self, but it’s not a second thing. It’s only an appearance that means it never existed, in truth. It’s only existence. Since it was apparent was borrowed from them. It’s the Self that appears in the waking dream. The states are total appearances of how reality is. They’re manifestations of reality, and all those appearances have no existence apart from that, witnessing consciousness in which they appear, abide, and disappear—this intuition of the states. We have to see.
Do we intuit the states? Did I come with this body, mind, senses, and ego? We all think that waking up is an experience of our mind in the real world. And then the waking mind imagines a dream. But when looked at from the point of view of intuition. Then the waking mind is in the waking world that is subsumed in the waking state. When the waking goes, the waking mind doesn’t continue into the dream. In the dream, a dream mind appears that has no relationship to the waking mind. From the waking point of view, we say the dream is a creation of the waking mind. But from the point of view of experience, the states equally cancel each other. We can see that just like a dream appeared to me. And nobody else. It wasn’t a shared experience, even though I was talking to my dream friend in the dream world, and we went to a dream movie, which was so crowded. There were so many people. It seemed like a common experience in the dream.
But from the point of view of intuition. The only one who was aware of that dream was me. It’s private. The one who sees the dream Is the same one who sees the waking. That one who sees the dream and sees the waking. Is that the mind in the dream or the ego in the dream? He never came to Woke, and the waking ego in the waking mind never went to dream. They are both appearances to that same consciousness and the states and that common.
When we think, waking is common to the reader, me, and everyone who has read this. But tonight, I’m going to have a private dream. That’s when I take the waking point of view – as the primary point of view. But when I give up the bias and look at the experience, the intuition of the states, then it becomes easy to see a couple of things. It appears in my light of consciousness, and I objectify the whole dream with all the subjects and objects in the dream in the same way. When the waking appears and the dream is circulated, I objectify the journey with all the people in it and me. And it’s a shared experience, but it’s the same witness that witnessed both states. Now, if you’ve been able to follow this type of intuitive reasoning based on experience, you’ll be able to realize that I, which is the witness of both states, never change because I’m not in time; I have no past. So I exist when the dream appears. I just when the waking is ending.
Then I say; I’m not aware of anything. I see nothing is appearing. That intuition remains, but nothing appears. So whether it’s deep sleep or waking from a dream, my nature never changes. It’s not in time, and it’s multitudes; also, it’s not one. Because there is nothing in the Deep sleep state, the Self is neither one nor many. It’s neither changing nor changeless, only in relation to the duality in this state. We say the Self is one. But in this Self there, there’s no number one to. It’s all within the world. It’s one without a second because of everything in the world. It’s one head a second. But here, it’s the only reality that has no number. We say it’s changeless in relation to the changing states. But it is in its nature. It’s neither changing nor unchanging. Because changing and unchanging are two concepts related to time. Something unchanging means it was always like that – It’s like that now. But this intuitive consciousness that lights up the states is not in time. It always exists—a timeless existence.
Now, the problem of my witness, your witness, doesn’t arise. Now we can see that intuitive awareness that consciousness is one in which the states appear, and the world is in common with this state. To think that my waking world is independent of my waking state is to make an abstract that can never be verified and experienced. Experience will be. The dream cancels the waking in the same way that the waking cancels the dream. And that, just like a dream, can disappear into a deep sleep. Waking can disappear into a deep sleep. From the point of view of deep sleep when no waking is appearing, and no dream is appearing. Is it even deep sleep?
From the waking bias point of view, I said I went to sleep and knew nothing. But that waking ego never got out of the way. He said he didn’t go to sleep. A state is a state that has to last for a while. But in a deep sleep, there’s no time. How could it be a state? When waking and dreaming don’t appear, all that remains is that intuitive consciousness, the existence that never goes out of existence. It never changes. It’s the only reality. By the way, we have to ask ourselves this critical question. Who is it that experiences the waking and the dream in their absence? Is it the waking ego? That knows that it’s gone and deep sleep. Is that the dreamy girl? That one consciousness, that one existence- Is the only reality. It never changes. The definition of reality is not what I see with my eyes and my use of magic with my mind or philosophize with logic that could never be reality. Reality is that which never changes. And that which is changing. Like everything in this world and even the states themselves. It can’t be real. That which changes can’t be absolute, and that which never changes. That is Absolute Reality.
“This Universal Self is not only distinct from the objective world, but also from the ego or the ‘I’ notion in all of us, and consequently from the body, the senses and the mind which are ‘owned’ by the ego. Therefore, it is beyond the scope of the dogmas of theology which rest on faith alone, as also beyond the surmises of speculative philosophy inasmuch as it is the most indubitable fact of human experience which can be neither affirmed nor denied; neither proved nor disproved by reason or dialectics and neither to be believed nor rejected as an impossible fact.” from The Magic Jewel of Intuition.
