3 (b) Analysis of Experience of State of Consciousness Described in Mandukya Upanishad
7:04 AM Posted In Yogic Experience of States of Consciousness Edit ThisDream State of Consciousness
Instead of taking it as the playground of unconscious, the Upanisadic sage regards this state as that of consciousness itself and very much akin to its state of wakefulness. What differentiates it from that of waking state is that it is shorn of active participation of the outer senses in its operation but is taken over by inner senses. In this state of consciousness, mental modifications and discernments continue to operate as they are operative in the waking state with certain variations in its spatio-temporal status. This is due to the autonomy of the space and time the dreaming consciousness is placed in. It perceives inward and has the same limbs and mouths as that of waking state. Being distinct from the waking state, it is called Taijasa because there is absence of sensory data; its proceedings are dominated by the innate luminosity of consciousness.
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad gives a detailed exposition of this state of consciousness when King Janaka places before the Sage Yajnavalkya, a query regarding the light helping us in seeing things. The king begins his query with the source of light in which normally we see things and finally the query centres on that source of light, if one, put in such a situation, were dumb and mute. Sage Yajnavalkya suggests the self as the centre of consciousness as the ultimate light (Brhadaranyaka Up.IV.3.1-6).
With the introduction of consciousness as the ultimate light, he expatiates the states of consciousness. He explains the self as the essence of the personality which, while remaining itself, moves from the waking to the beatific taking a pause in the state of dream. While staying in the state of dream, Yajnavalkya observes that the self has the privilege of observing this world of the waking state on the one side and the beatific one on the other.
He further observes that in the state of dream, the self, having withdrawn itself from its involvement in the affairs of the world, comes to itself and starts operating in the light of its innate consciousness. This consciousness gets concentrated well within itself and becomes highly creative, as is evident from the fact, according to Yajnavalkya, there are neither chariots nor horses nor even roads actually in the perspective of the dreamer lying in his bed and yet in his dream he is prone to become aware of presence of all these without any doubt about their reality at the moment. So is the case with a world of other images coming to him on other occasions, which may be familiar or unfamiliar, connected or disconnected with one another. Yajnavalkaya explains the appearance of these images as the creativity of the self which, having delegated the responsibility of taking care of the physical world to the pranas, and thus made itself free of its physical involvements, moves around in its psychic environment resulting in the creation of these images (Br. Up. IV.3.9-13).
It is a state that obscures the true nature – svarupa of the individual by constant emergence of thought constructs each of which performs its own functions and whose contents are diversely manifest forms such as towns, mountains, forests, etc., generated inwardly in the absence of external objects and independently of them when the waking state ceases. The subject is not a perceiver but one who thinks and turns on himself, reflects (vimarsati) on the mental impressions (samskaras) previously formed in his consciousness by outer objects and orders them into thought constructs (vikalpa). Therefore, this state of consciousness (Br.Up.10.247-250) occurs not only while we are asleep, but also during the phase of perception in which the external object (see Utpaladevacarya's Isvara-pratyabhijna-karika,3.2.16) is represented mentally. Here the impurity of Karma (karmamala) persists only as a latent trace while the objects so perceived inwardly are illusory creations of the consciousness generated in the individual subject’s mind and hence not perceivable by all.
The practice of dhyana, in which the object of meditation is represented mentally in such a way that the yogi achieves absorption, is said to take place in the dream state. Here the yogis’s prana and all his ideas are then drawn together into one place in which his awareness is firmly established, Thus, they call the dream state as established in one place (padastha) and from their point of view, it is a higher and subtler level of consciousness than the waking state and hence it is easier to rise from it to a state of absorption. Those who tread the path of knowledge, jnana, call this state pervasion (vyapti) due to its correspondence to autonomous cognitive awareness which is not conditioned by the object of knowledge and is free to pervade everywhere. (Tantraloka, 10.255)
Like the four states of waking consciousness, the dream states of consciousness also has four states:
1. Svapna-jagrat (Dreaming in Waking):
This state is experienced when one mistakenly believes that his mental projections are actual objects appearing before him. In this state of consciousness, such a person is caught in the flux of objective perceptions and at other times by the waves of his own mental impressions without being able to distinguish between them and is constantly coming and going from one sphere to the other. It is the world of vikalpas (ideations). It also gives the experience of clear, precise and stationary dreams. Malinivijaya Tantra calls it gatagata or coming and going. Here the movement of prana and apana are prominent.
2. Svapna-svapna (Dreaming in Dreaming):
In this state of consciousness, the entire dream-phenomena appear to be hazy, vague and disorderly. The individual’s awareness is here carried hither and thither by the mental images which arise within him without his being aware of either their cause or purpose and he is in a world where one thing may be transformed into another without seeming strange. The individual has little control over what he sees, despite the fact it is a creation of his own consciousness. It is called the state of suviksipta or well-dispersed.
3. Svapna-susupti (Dreaming in Deep Sleep):
It is a state of coherence because here subjectivity (pramatrbhava) is intensely felt so that the dreamer establishes a clear connexion between one dream object and another. At that time, he realises that the objects before him are not really a part of the external world and that he must be dreaming. The dreamer enjoys full, peaceful sleep without feeling any incongruity among his dream objects. He, as the subject, is able to experience a subtle touch of universal consciousness while dreaming. The jnanins call this state as samgata or consistent.
4. Svapna-turiya (Dreaming in the Fourth):
When the dreamer experiences the Fourth State while dreaming, in the susamahita or attentive state, he is completely awake to himself as the dreamer and can rise directly from the dream state to that of contemplation. It is a state in which the dreamer does not lose his self-consciousness despite entire phantasmagoria of his dream state and knows that he is only dreaming. This state is called svapna turiya. It is a state in which the dreamer is fully integrated individual.
For a common man, the dream state is just a svapna or dream state in which he views the various vikalpas of his dream without any contact of the external world. But a Yogi includes all these four states in one blanket term called padastha, because he, by means of yoga, abides in the pada or state of his own Self in all these conditions.
To be Concluded...
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