Meditation According to the Upanishads - 4. Swami Krishnananda.

  

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Friday, February 19, 2021. 11:01. AM.
(Spoken on January 14th, 1973)
Post-4.

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But the purpose of consciousness is to cease, to put an end to, all tension with objects. In this effort it has not succeeded in the waking condition, and it is not going to succeed in the dreaming condition either. Merely because we only contemplate objects in the mind instead of actually confronting them physically, it does not mean that the mind has ceased from its effort. What gives pain, inconvenience and discomfort is struggle of every kind.

In sleep, consciousness falls back into a condition of inactivity where, though it is not in a state of harmony with its objects, at least it is unconscious of the disharmony that is there. See the difference between samadhi and sleep. While in samadhi we have a consciousness of harmony, in sleep there is an unconsciousness of disharmony. Quite different and opposite they are, though they look alike. The difference is as between the joy of a wise man and the joy of a fool. Both are happy people. An idiot is happy and a genius is also happy, but the difference is very obvious. The negative condition into which we enter in sleep is a defeatist position of consciousness where it has struggled but failed in its attempt.

Hence, the Upanishad tells us all these three states are phenomenal. They are states to be traversed through, transcended, and the real nature of consciousness cannot be recognised or seen either in waking, dream or sleep. Sleep is, actually speaking, the mischief maker. The real ringleader we will find in the deep sleep state. The potentiality for suffering is there in a covered form even in the state of deep sleep, like a tree existing in a seed, and it will sprout up into activity, into the actual experience of pain and pleasure, when we enter the dream and the waking conditions.

Therefore, the three states—waking, dream and sleep—are only temporal efforts at the bringing about of a cessation of disharmony between consciousness and objects, now struggling, now turning back, and then completely forgetting the trouble itself due to exhaustion. It is like a warrior going to the battlefront and fighting and, unable to conquer the enemy, returning home to rest; then, unable to even bear this suffering, he goes to sleep as if everything is all right but dreams of the battle, and wakes again only to realise the searing fact that the battle is going on and he has yet to face it. The whole of the samsara chakra, the cycle of births and deaths, the pains and joys of life, are a series, a circular movement, as it were, of the effort of consciousness to completely free itself from the clutches of objective confrontation. Hence, we are no better whether we are in waking, dream or sleep. We are equally fools in all three states.

The freedom of the soul is in the fourth state of consciousness, called turiya. This fourth state of consciousness is not really the fourth, numerically. It is the fourth in the sense that it is not any one of the three states already mentioned. It is universal consciousness and, therefore, we cannot call it the fourth. But because it is not any of these three, we categorise it as the fourth state, turiya, for our own convenience. In the waking condition we are externally conscious, in the dream condition we are internally consciousness, in the sleeping condition we are absolutely unconscious, and in turiya we are super-conscious. External consciousness, internal consciousness, unconsciousness and super-consciousness are the states through which we have to pass.

To be continued ....

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