Commentary on the Panchadasi: 4. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Friday 06, June 2025, 12:00.
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Commentary on the Panchadasi:3. Swami Krishnananda.
Chapter 1: Tattva Viveka – Discrimination of Reality
Mantras: 1-5
Post-4.

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Mantram-4:

Tatha svapne'tra vedyam tu na sthiram jagare sthiram, tad behdo'tastayah samvid ekarūpa na bhidyate (4). 

The difference between waking and dreaming is that waking looks like a longer experience, and dream is often considered to be shorter in comparison with waking. But that is a different matter. In the same way as we have diversity of perception in waking, there is diversity of perception in dream also. In dream we also have mountains and rivers and people, and all kinds of things. How do we know them? We have got dream eyes, dream ears, dream taste, dream touch, and so on. The mind in dream manufactures a new set of senses which are not the waking senses, and these sense organs specially created by the mind in the dreaming condition become the sources of the diversity of perception of dream objects. Even here, in order to know that there is a variety and a diversity of objects in dream, there has to be consciousness. That consciousness in dream is different, once again, as in the case of waking, from the variety that we saw in dream.

Also, the same person wakes and the same person dreams. On the one hand, consciousness is different from the variety of objects and the sensations thereof; and on the other hand, consciousness is different from waking and dreaming. It is not involved either in waking or in dreaming because it knows the difference between waking and dreaming. We know that we dreamt; we know that we are awake. Who are 'we' who make this statement that waking is different from dreaming? So consciousness does two things at the same time. It distinguishes between objects, and transcends the objects by standing above them. Secondly, it distinguishes between the states of consciousness (waking, dream and sleep), and stands above them as turiya—that is, the fourth state of consciousness.

The difference between waking and dream is only a question of shorter or longer duration, though in dream we can also have long durations of experience. But in comparison with waking, we find that we slept for a few minutes and had a long dream; and a few minutes are very short in comparison with the hours of waking. So apart from the fact of the difference in duration between waking and dream, the consciousness operating behind the senses of perception in waking and dream is identical.

Supot thitasya sauspta tamo bodho bhavet smrtih, sa cava buddha visaya'vabuddham tattada tamah (5). 

In waking, we have one kind of consciousness. In dream, we have another kind of consciousness. In sleep, we do not have any kind of consciousness. There is a darkness, a kind of ignorance in the state of deep sleep. But it is surprising that we all know that we were awake, we were dreaming, and we were sleeping. Granted, there was a kind of consciousness in waking, as it has been explained, and there was also the same consciousness operating in dream. But there was no consciousness in sleep. How did we know, then, that we slept? Knowledge of having slept cannot be there unless consciousness was there.

In waking, there are physical objects before consciousness. In dream, there are mental objects before consciousness. The object before consciousness in sleep is ignorance; a cloud-like covering over consciousness is the object. The consciousness knows that it knew nothing. It is a negative kind of consciousness. It is worthwhile analysing into the circumstance of our being aware that we slept, because sleeping is an absence of consciousness; and the fact of our having slept coming to us as a memory thereafter is something interesting.

We know what memory is. Memory, or remembrance, is the aftermath of a conscious experience that we had earlier. We remember a thing after having experienced it; and if we did not have any kind of experience at all, the memory of it would not be there. So to assert that we slept yesterday, we must have had an awareness of having slept. But unfortunately, the awareness of having slept is not possible because during sleep our consciousness was not actually knowing the condition of sleep. We have to analyse by a fact of inference that consciousness must have been there because unconscious experience is unknown. In order for any experience to be remembered, it has to be attached to consciousness.

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