The 4th State

Dream is such a beautiful phenomenon - when we dream we don’t realize that it is not reality. We only come to know this when we wake up. In that state we experience and act as if we are living that particular dream. Each night we don’t go to bed with a story in our head, but our mind is so creative it creates a new story each time we go to sleep. Some dreams are pleasant and some may be scary. It is a world of its own reality. This is just a clue from nature how reality can alter and can make a person believe what he is experiencing as reality.

How many people have tried to figure out the secrets of Maya of this very existence and have found the truth of reality?

When we start to discover our self and world of reality in which we are living we come across so many questions and one gets lost in them. One such fundamental and curious phenomenon we experience is the states of reality. We all are aware and have experienced 3 states of reality namely, dreams, deep sleep: no dream state and waking state. Almost all our entire life, at any point of time, we can be found in either one of these three states. We would not have given much thought to it and would be busy in the daily rat race of life: Eat- Work – Sleep

Our scriptures say there is one more state of reality: Super conscious state. Westerners call it as Christ consciousness and easterners refer it to as Krishna consciousness or Awakened state or Transcendental consciousness. We are not "consciously" aware of this fourth state in the normal course of living. However, in certain moments that can only be described as sublime, we get a hint of this fourth state which exists within us, which is all ours to explore.

It is also called “turiya” experience of pure awareness.

“The fourth state of consciousness is beyond the states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep and stringing together all the states; the Metaphysical Consciousness distinct from the psychological or empirical self; the Saksi or witnessing consciousness; the transcendental Self”.

                                                                                                            --Wikipedia

Yoga is meant to lead a person towards this direction, to experience the Truth as it is. Experience is the only direct way of understanding the truth. Without experience everything seems like a concept or a notion. The question here is how many are ready to come out of the rat race of life and know for themselves the reality of truth? If they are not experiencing this state of existence then they are missing the truth of life.


Authored by GANDHARV