FOUR S TATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Vivekananda beautifully says, 'Even if we have one single thoughtless awareness experience in our life, that is, a single conscious experience in our life, that is enough. At the time of leaving the body, it will come up and we will leave our body peacefully. We will have just awareness without thoughts.'
The idea 'I' exists in all of us when we are awake. In deep sleep, is it there? No. In the same way, almost every one of us has thoughts when we are awake. In deep sleep, do we have thoughts? No. There are two states of mind and two states of being. These two criss-cross each other and create four states of being in which we exist and live our lives.
The first state is to be with 'I', and with thoughts. This is what we experience as our waking state. In Sanskrit, we call it the jagrat state; jagratavastha – the waking state.
In the next state, there will be thoughts, but there will not be the sense of 'I' that we experience in the waking state. That is
what we call the dream state. You may ask how is it that in the dream state we don't have the sense of 'I'.
Let me explain. Now, in the waking state, if you choose, you can control your thoughts, am I right? You can suppress them, alter them, and recreate them in a different way. You can do whatever you want with them because the frequency of 'I' is higher than the frequency of thoughts. 'I' is more powerful here.
But in the dream state the frequency of your thoughts is more than the frequency of the 'I' consciousness. That is why you are not able to control your dreams as you wish to. Are you able to control your dreams and dream the way you want to? No! Wherever the dreams take you, you have to go, that's all. In the dream state, the frequency of thoughts is greater. That is why they just flow. You can't do anything about it. If at all we have the opportunity to dream what we want to, we know what type of dreams we will be having! So understand, the dream state is when you don't have 'I' but you do have thoughts.
In the third state, neither have you the 'I' nor have you the thoughts. This is the deep sleep state, or sound sleep state.
There is a fourth state that we never experience. In that state one will have the 'I' consciousness but not have any thoughts. This is what we call turiya or meditation or samadhi or atmagnana, nirvana, the self-realization experience, whatever you want to call it. This is what we call samadhi. This is the state where you have the 'I' consciousness but no thoughts. This is what I mean when I say, 'thoughtless awareness' or 'consciousness'. Even one glimpse of this state is enough, that when you leave your body you will have your rest there!
As of now, this turiya state or samadhi state or consciousness… all these things will look like black and white to us. We will not give that much importance to all these things. We will think this is for philosophers or for people who are ready to die of old age. It will be very difficult to surrender to even the idea of this turiya state. It will be very difficult to work for this consciousness because it appears only as black and white to us, of little or no value to us.
You must be thinking, 'Who knows what the truth is? He must be telling something to do his business!' I always tell people that it is not so easy to understand all these things. It is not so easy to surrender to these ideas as of now.
The moment you hear the words 'consciousness' or 'surrender' or 'samadhi' or 'meditation', immediately, what do you think? 'All this is very difficult for me.' And not only that, we will always have the fear, 'You may now tell me to surrender, but tomorrow you may take away my property or you may take away my husband or you may take my wife away from me. You may take away my kids also. Or, I myself may get inspired and go behind you!' There are so many troubles, so many problematic possibilities that you see when you hear all this.
It is very difficult to trust somebody. It is very difficult to enter into this fourth state or even come close to it. But it seems difficult only because all these things appear in two-colour now – black and white. But when you leave the body, then it will appear as four-colour and whatever you thought of as four-colour now will become completely two-colour, black and white.