Vemuri Ramesam, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 8:20 am

The Enigma of Deep Sleep – 4

From the discussions and the examples presented in the preceding three parts of this Series, we can arrive at the following incontestable conclusions:

1.  The mind is absent during deep sleep.

2.  The mind which manifests as the thought during awake stage has no immediate and direct experience of deep sleep.  Therefore, it can never understand what deep sleep actually is.

3.  Irrespective of the form one may be in at any given moment, there is a basic self-evident Knowingness of who one truly is. This Knowingness is an indefinable intrinsic nature which is never absent but may temporarily get occluded (e.g. the lion cub as long as it was with the flock of sheep; Peter Smith in the garbs of Antonio or Hamlet).

4.  We are not surprised by the changes in shapes when we wake up from sleep (e.g. the configuration of the stars in the sky, the crease of the bed sheet). We do not question “the discontinuity” that had happened in spatial dimensions before and after sleep. (We will discuss this aspect later on again).

5.  The mind in the awake state is habituated to continuity without break in time. Therefore, we expect that time should continue without a break during our deep sleep too.

6.  Mind confabulates a story, post facto, giving a temporal continuity to discrete and disconnected events (e.g. the discontinuous appearances of Antonio in different Acts/Scenes in the drama are linked by an external narrative woven as a story around the appearances).

Mind or thought is a perturbation. It is a movement. Movement is displacement. Displacement is action involving time. Therefore, there is no thought without time and no time without thought. Hence time or mind cannot ‘think’ of its own absence. If there is a gap in the available information to establish the continuity of time, it imagines the presence of something or the other to fill the gap.

The ability of the mind to fill the gaps in information has proved itself as a great survival tool for the body-organism. So the body-organism conserved this strange characteristic through biological evolution. Maybe an example will elucidate the concept better.

Suppose you are going along a mountain track in a forest (as the ancient primitive man must have done) during dim sunlight.  You notice a rustle and a few brown and yellow patches in a nearby bush. The mind immediately imagines the shape of a wild animal connecting all the color patches and alerts the leg muscles to run to save you. No harm is done even if the mental imagination of a tiger or lion later on proves to be a mistake.  But what if the mind did not have this capacity? You would have merely seen a few disconnected color patches through the bush, even if a wild brute were to be actually sitting there, and before you know what the color patches are, the animal could have pounced on you and made you its dinner. 

How easily our mind succumbs to this habit of filling the gap in information can be illustrated with the small cardboard toy that children play with as shown in the figure below:  

 Fig. 1:  The Picture Puzzle – The base                  Fig. 2:  The overlay slide

If the strips of bush in Fig. 2 cover the alternate slots in Fig. 1, you will see either a tiger or a horse. You think that the complete animal is present behind the bushes. But you can see from the first picture that there was no continuity in the animal body of the tiger or the horse. 

The unquestioned belief on our part that time continues without a break is the reason that misleads our mind in understanding the truth.

The mind has no information of what was there in deep sleep, and yet it confabulates a story to fill up the gap in information out of its sheer habit. It imagines that it witnessed a dark unholy “ignorance” during deep sleep.   The factual position is that ‘Whatever-that-was-there-in-deep sleep’ is not deep, dark, blank or asleep. What is there in deep sleep is just the intrinsic Knowingness of who you truly are – indefinable and never ever absent.

*****

Our normal understanding is that we have three states of consciousness – the wakeful state, the dream state and the deep sleep state. Most of the people think that when once we go to sleep, we get some dreams and maybe some dreamless sleep and then we get up refreshed in the morning, as if sleep is one continuous event.  But that is not the factual position. We go through each night at least 4-5 cycles of various stages of deep sleep, dreams and waking up. Each cycle lasts for about 90 minutes.  It is usually the dream from the last cycle before waking up that we tend to remember. The dream episode of the last cycle in the night also happens to be the longest  one.

Suppose we express the cycles of our sleep during one night using the symbols of A, U and M to represent the awake, dream and deep sleep periods, the sleep pattern will be something like (neglecting the substages in deep sleep):

AMU,  MU, MU, MU, MU, … MUA

and not AUM (please note that even the sequence of dream and deep sleep is not correct in the AUM representation).

Secondly, by positing “Me” as the silent background turIya against which the three distinct stages, A, U, and M take place, there is scope for wrongly conceiving that the constant ever present “Me” passes through the three worlds of awake, dream and deep sleep. Another mistaken idea is that the deep sleep stage is causal to the other two stages like a seed is the cause for the plant.

Recalling the example of Shakespeare dramas, if Peter Smith played the role of Antonio and later in another show the role of Hamlet, can we conclude that the role of Antonio is causal to that of Hamlet?  All such interpretations are the stories confabulated by the mind to assign some meaning to bizarre unrelated events and abstract a pattern that is not really there!

The inviolable fact of the matter is that the unchanging pure Knowingness which I am, may take the shape of deep sleep where there are no dimensions (i.e. beyond space-time dimensions); appear as dreams (in time dimension) or as the world (with space-time dimensions).

If we do not take into consideration the various nuances as discussed above and the characteristic limitations of the mind and if we leave everything to its fantasy and fascination, we end up with an intricately woven theory, packed with innumerable complex terms and concepts and additional layers of theories to cover up any gaping holes detected in those concepts.  We invent a fixed entity that passes through the worlds, one world after the other, carrying with him/her an ID tag and messenger bodies, multiple sheaths of bodies (food body, mental body, causal body etc.), a set of labels standing for an individual (vyaShTi)  and another set for collective level (samaShTi) and so on. And then we glory ourselves, lost in the plethora of names and forms we create, assigning mystical qualities and mysterious attributes to the invented labels.  Instead, one can be parsimonious with concepts and be realistic in deciphering our experience.

The above analysis brings us in direct conflict with some established belief systems and teachings that are in vogue either because of their ancient character or because they were pronounced by highly revered Masters deeply knowledgeable about nature, human beings and a wisdom transcending both. It is not that we should declare them to be wrong.  If we correctly understand the factual position from our experience, we will be in a position to better appreciate the need and utility of those ancient models like ‘three states of consciousness plus turIya model.’  We shall take up a detailed discussion of this in a later part our series. (I also remember that we have yet to examine the falsity of the concept of a “next morning” – vide Part 3). But for the present, I would like to introduce a simple model of “Four Outcomes” for your consideration.

What we call our Body is actually an ensemble of different organs and limbs. The most significant of them are the five sensory organs and the five motor or action organs.

Our mind is the ensemble of all our thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, emotions, qualia etc.

Though Science tells us that the mind is non-different from what goes on in the brain, let us for the present analysis assume that the body and mind are two different entities.

The two entities, viz. mind and body, can be either in alert or active state or in inert or restful state.

The two entities and the two states together can give rise to four outcomes by combination.

The four outcomes are (see the figure below): 

I – Wakeful State when both the mind and the body are present and active.

II – Dream State when the body is at rest and the mind is active.

III – Deep Sleep when both the mind and the body are at rest.

IV – What is this possible fourth outcome when the body is present and active but mind is not active?

(To Continue …..)

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