Articles for Saadhana

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Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.

Questions about dream. Let us understand very clearly that our entire life is based upon three different states of the mind or Consciousness.

One is the common wakeful state where the mind wakes up and extends itself so to say through the sensory organs to perceive the sensory objects. For a person who has no eyes, or who is blind, there will be no light, form, colour or shape at all. These eyes are not made by the world. Every organ in our body including the body is a design from, by, and of our own inner presence, the Consciousness. It is not at all designed by any external factor.

The child’s growth in the mother’s womb is not at all contributed by the mother, except that the mother’s blood becomes food for the fetus to grow. So the wakeful state is one where the consciousness or the mind which animates and activates the body becomes wakeful and extends itself through the sensory organs to receive different objects. Are these objects independently remaining or are they creations of our own senses and the mind is a very crucial question.

A thing can become an object only in front of a subject. Without the subject, the object can never be. You are the subject and before you, the entire object world presents itself. And this presentation is there only when you wake up. As you wake up, you also go to sleep. Waking up is your own individual, personal, sovereign state. As the mind wakes up, a number of objects are perceived. Where are they perceived, in the mind itself, not one millimeter away from the body. It is within the body, in the sphere of the mind that all objects get reflected in the form of reflections. The same mind wipes of all wakeful impressions, goes to sleep where no object is felt, perceived, or experienced at all. In the waking state so many objects are perceived by the individual. But in the sleep state, no object at all is perceived. There is no body, there is not even mind, the intelligence, the ego - everything stands suspended. And you get up to say, “I slept”.

Sleep is an intransitive verb which implies no object at all. So the sleeping is your own affair, no object is involved there. And when you say I slept, it is the subject ‘I’ that has slept and no object was there. And you sleep for about 6 to 8 hours of the day. So one third of everyday, you become the subject and you wake up to say I slept. Whatever objects were perceived in the wakefulness, wakeful hours, where did they go? And how did you remain alone in sleep? Now sometimes you slip from sleep into dream. There, your mind proves its capacity to produce the objects.

You are not able to understand that the objects are produced by the mind in the wakeful state. Because you will say that the objects are there whether I am there or not. The objects are there for whom, either for another person or the whole human society or other beings which has similar senses. If the senses were not there in the perceiving individual, no objects would be there at all. But the wakefulness imposes a delusion by virtue of which you think that the objects are there and that is why I perceive them. This truth is completely invalidated when you have your dream.

When you sleep the entire object world is wiped off. And in such a state what is there within you which can create another world what you call consciousness or the mind? And the mind produces a parallel world where there are gross objects the earth, the sun, the moon, the different objects. The mind brings another body also. The waking body is lying still. But with another body the mind goes to different places. Some times it gets hungry, you enter a hotel and you take food - when the waking food is still lying undigested. When the waking food is lying undigested in the stomach, you have dream hunger. To satisfy it, to appease it, you have to take dream food. Everything is generated by the mind. And in that generation, gross things are there. Now a question arises. The mind is within the body and it is subtle. Can it produce gross objects within the body? Will not the body break into pieces, if such gross things are there inside?

So how is this creation made? What is its basis? An intelligent man will have to think consistently to find out what the mystery is. So we have to understand that we have three different states of awareness. One is the wakefulness where gross objects, distinctions, and separateness prevail. We have the sleep where none of these things is present. And we have dream where the mind alone produces all these things. So the mind or the consciousness is such a wonderful presence which is capable of, by virtue of its own volition, producing anything and everything.

We summarize it to say that there is an inscrutable power associated with the consciousness which is capable of creating anything and uncreating anything and also bringing whatever changes are necessary in whatever is present. To make, to unmake, and to change - these are the three wonderful powers of the consciousness. When you understand this, all the questions about dream will fall to the ground or will become clear. What is that?

The consciousness has got supreme power. The entire creation is its product and its make. Now, whatever it wants to do with the creation, we have knowledge. The entire knowledge is inborn, it is born from inside. No knowledge comes from outside. Newton enquired into the falling of the apple and he found out there was gravity which pulled the apple. This knowledge came to him from within, not from the apple, not from the earth. The earth and apple only became objects to provoke him, to think, and enquire. So, the knowledge, the knowledge – this is the greatest potential that we can think of. It is that knowledge and knowingness of the consciousness that is the power to make anything, unmake anything, and change whatever it likes.

So the entire dream is a phenomenon displayed by the consciousness to make us understand that it has got supreme potential in the matter of creating anything it wants. It is the same creational power that expresses itself as the wakefulness where we feel that we have a body, we have the senses and through the senses we interact with the world. Now that it is all made by the mind, the consciousness is clearly proven when all this wakeful experience is completely stopped at one stroke and you go into sleep to have nothing, to feel nothing, and to be nothing. What more do you want? It is something like multiplying a figure with infinity in wakefulness and multiplying the same figure with zero is sleep. The figure remains the same. It is multiplied by infinity in the wakeful state and by zero in the sleep state. Just see what a wonder is this.

This is called, I like to call, the philosophy of experiantialism. This is not taking to anything like religion, God, or any other factor but only to go into our life and the three states of awareness or consciousness that we have making them a fundamental to analyse, to probe into, to enquire into, and finally come to a conclusion about. This is called the philosophy of avastha trayam. Avastha means state of awareness, traya means three. So avastha traya is this philosophy called.

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.

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