Finding Awareness in Deep Sleep - 11th August 2016

Ananta Ji, in the contemplation, I am conscious of the awareness. While in deep sleep, I can't say I'm conscious of the awareness. I'm stuck in this. This is very good, I enjoy these kind of... I'm stuck in this. Could you help me understand this? Thank you.

Yes, my dear. Let's look together. Maybe it is just a question of terms and how we are using them. That whatever we report about deep sleep, you see, whether we say that there is something there or nothing there—the usual one is to say that there is really nothing in the sleep state, isn't it? They say there's nothing in the sleep state. Now, the knowing that there is no phenomenal thing in the sleep state, this knowingness itself is what I call awareness, you see.

So this which has no attribute, has no... we cannot even call it a presence, actually. It is before 'I am', you see. And yet we are aware that there is something called sleep. It's not like we're going from waking to dream, to dream to waking, and there is no knowing of something called sleep state. We say that 'I went to sleep and I woke up', you see. So there is a knowingness of this. And we say, 'What was sleep like?' 'No, there was nothing there.' There is nothing I can report on the sleep state, which means that there is a knowingness or an awareness that there was nothing. No phenomena, no phenomenal experience, including that which we call being or 'I am', you see.

So I would call this awareness of nothing. Then what happened? Then we say, 'I woke up at 7:30.' So what happened at 7:30 that we say that I woke up? Did something change for this awareness? You find that awareness remained unchanged. This knowingness remained unchanged, but there was now this presence of being. This I amness was there. 'I exist.' This sense came into existence in that which we call the waking state. Or that, actually, the waking state is in that—let's not confuse ourselves with that.

So this I amness is now here, the sense that I exist. This is what I usually refer to, you see. Now there is an awareness of Consciousness, and in the sleep state, there was just awareness. So maybe the simplest explanation could be that we are exchanging the terms. Maybe the way you're using consciousness, I refer to that as awareness. But we can look. So if you found something in your experience which was not in resonance with what I just shared about this, you can ask and we can look further into that.